Movie Review Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Directed by Mark Romanek

Written by Alex Garland 

Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling 

Release Date September 15th, 2010

Published November 4th, 2010 

The wonderful thing about “Never Let Me” Go is how its languorousness invites the viewer to project a meaning onto it. Yes, that projection requires ignoring a few things about the characters and what is happening on screen but there is something valuable and even entertaining about a movie that gives the viewer so much room to move around. Some have found parallels to the holocaust. The great Roger Ebert finds a modern equivalent in the sad fate of workers at big box stores like Wal-Mart. Other critics acknowledge a philosophical truth in the film that is just out of their grasp but somehow knowing it is there is enough for them.

Strangely, I find myself somewhere within that last group. I too want to believe and have searched for various philosophic or metaphoric meanings in Mark Romanek's gorgeous direction and Alex Garland's teasing screen adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's moving if also vaguely interpreted novel.

Kathy (Carey Mulligan) fell in love with Tommy when both were young students at an out of the way private school somewhere in the English countryside. Kathy was a self conscious introvert with the soul of an artist. Tommy was an outcast prone to violent rages that only served to make him even more of an outcast.

The center of their world is their relationship with Ruth (Keira Knightley) a popular girl who befriended Kathy in search of a worshiper and fell in with Tommy as a way of preventing that worship from being cast elsewhere. It's clear to us and especially clear to Ruth that Tommy and Kathy should be together but her insecure need for their attention supersedes her ability to let her friends be happy.

This is especially tragic because Hailsham is not merely a country boarding school and the students are not really students at all. As explained in excruciating detail by one of the teachers, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins), Hailsham students will have painfully short lives in which they will donate their organs until they complete, a nicer way of saying they are spare parts until they die.

The brilliance of “Never Let Me Go” is not in setting up a life or death situation but in the real human ways that these characters take in this extraordinary information and assimilate this knowledge as part of who they are rather than the going concern of some sci fi story of survival.

The arc of the average life is played out with a timeline in mind that lasts a lot longer in our minds than in reality. For Kathy, Tommy and Ruth the arc of birth, life and death is compacted into a mere 30 years at most yet they grow and age and live as if a full life were lived.

They cram their short lives with experiences of love and compassion that a longer life no doubt takes for granted. When Kathy finally gets the opportunity to be with Tommy she doesn't spend much time lamenting, they get right to loving and while there is temporary hope for more life, Kathy is not so concerned about prolonging love as she is about enjoying what she has.

Ruth's is the saddest of all of the stories. Her life is marked by pettiness and a greed for attention. She found weaker kids and forced herself on their attention and in her fight to remain at the center of their world she destroyed them and herself, robbing all of them of the little life they could have had.

Carey Mulligan deserved an Oscar for her work in “Never Let Me Go.” The heart, the love and the compassion she portrays is the heartbreaking force of the film. A soul as wide and as deep as Kathy's deserved more than to be an organ bank and yet that is not what the film is about, it's about what life she brings to what little life she has and much of that is played on Mulligan's wonderfully expressive face.

Mark Romanek captures the essence of Ishiguro's novel in ways that most directors likely would not. Like Ishiguro, Romanek is not really interested in the grander political points about breeding humans for their organs. Rather, that is the setting for telling human stories about what real people would do in these circumstances. The fate of these characters lends a certain tragedy to them but that tragedy is compounded by what unique, fascinating and thoughtful beings these characters are.

The political points, the metaphors and meanings are ours to bring to the film. What Carey Mulligan, director Mark Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland are focused on are the human beings and the lives they live against this unique and tragic background. It's a wonderfully experimental ploy and it works brilliantly as a movie that makes you think for yourself and moves you deeply.

Movie Review One Hour Photo

One Hour Photo (2002) 

Directed by Mark Romanek

Written by Mark Romanek 

Starring Robin Williams, Michael Vartan, Connie Nielsen, Gary Cole, Eriq LaSalle 

Release Date August 21st, 2002 

Published August 20th, 2002 

Director Mark Romanek cut his teeth on music videos for artists like Lenny Kravitz, Madonna, and En Vogue. Especially memorable was the video he directed for Fiona Apple's "Criminal." A controversial video with Fiona and others in varying states of undress, the video had an atmosphere that dripped with sexuality. In the "Criminal" video, Romanek used everything from costumes to the set's retro-seventies green carpet to create an atmosphere at once familiar but also forbidden.

Atmosphere is what makes Romanek's second feature film--his previous work was 1985's Static--One Hour Photo, a creepy glimpse inside the mind of the most mundane madman the screen has ever seen.

Robin Williams stars as Sy the Photo Guy, as his customers at the retail store SavMart call him. Sy is an affable photo shop employee who is overly dedicated to the quality of his customers' photos. He has worked in the photo shop long enough to know the names and addresses of his regular customers and through their photos he knows even more than they would want him to. 

There is a very effective scene early on where Sy, the narrator, introduces us to some of his regular customers including amateur porn guy--maybe the only guy creepier than Sy himself. Sy's favorite customers are the Yorkin family. Stay at home mom Nina (Connie Nielsen), 9 year old Jakob, and Will (Michael Vartan). As the film develops (bad pun) Sy's obsession with the Yorkin's grows.

What sounds like a typical suspense thriller setup is played much more simply. Romanek allows the story to unravel at its own pace. This gives Williams the opportunity to reveal his character in more unique and interesting ways than your average thriller usually does. Williams seizes every opportunity to make Sy more vulnerable and almost innocent, which makes him so much scarier. You don't sympathize with Sy, but he earns your pity easily. I really liked the way Williams and Romanek conveyed Sy's sense of feeling that he was doing the right thing, Sy never seems to rationalize what he does because he doesn't think he has to.

As great as Williams is in One Hour Photo, for me the film is all about Romanek, who crafts a film of both visual and intellectual depth. Romanek employs these sensational tracking shots of Sy walking down these sterile hallways and perfectly assembled shelves at SavMart, all of it with the camera trained on Sy's determined, creepy stare.

Also effective is the score, which seems, at times, to be running through Sy's head. The rhythm of the score seems at times to match Sy's emotion. An early scene that takes the camera inside the inner workings of a film-developing machine is like a trip inside Sy's mind. Even the things that Sy watches on television however mundane they are seem to dovetail with what Sy is thinking. All of it creates an atmosphere that has not been so well-evoked since the days of Hitchcock.

Others have said that the film is told in flashback as Sy explains what happened to a detective played by Eriq Lasalle. I have a different take. I think Sy was running all that happened back in his own mind. He never told the police anything, except at the end, when he hints at what motivated the actions that the police already know about.

While the ending is somewhat unsatisfactory, attempting to explain why Sy does what he does demystifies him too much. Nonetheless, One Hour Photo Is an awesome film with visuals that should be used in film schools as a teaching tool. This is one of the year's best films.