Masterpiece or not, I fear the same fate awaits Never Let Me Go, although for quite different reasons. Unlike Joffe's job on Graham Greene, there's nothing which strikes one as arbitrary or crude about director Mark Romanek's handling of Ishiguro. It is nuanced, subtle and slow (boy, is it slow). Rather it is a problem which arises from the medium itself and the presence of starry names. The book concentrates for much longer, apparently, on the three main characters, Ruth, Kathy and Tommy, as children at Hailsham, the strait-laced boarding school which, we come to learn, is in fact a very politely organised clone farm full of kids who have been bred in laboratories. The film, however, soon leaves this section behind, in order that we can get to see Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield as these characters grown up, wrestling with love and loss, and dealing with the realisation that, just perhaps, the feelings they are experiencing will allow them to live that little bit longer before their time is up. Or, in the parlance of the film, that they may "defer" for a few years before facing "completion".
As a result, questions arise which can be easily avoided in the more airtight, imaginary world of a novel. Why, for example, are these poor creatures so docile? Why don't they simply flee to France on the Eurostar, or at least make for the Lake District? We see one of them driving, so it's not as though they've been left socially unequipped. Why do they seem to accept their fate? You need real restrictions in place for love to become tragic, whether they are provided by social conventions, armed guards or warring teenage gangs. An air of weary resignation doesn't quite cut it.
The three central performances are as good as they can be with such material. As the troubled Tommy, Andrew Garfield (who was excellent as the aggrieved best friend in The Social Network) provides some arresting moments; his look of confused incomprehension when told another nasty little bit of truth about his "life" is flawless and almost moving. Carey Mulligan's collection of slightly old-fashioned expressions work well in the deliberately retro atmosphere the film has been given (it takes place, presumably in an alternative universe, in the 1950s through to the '90s). And Keira Knightley's essential blankness might well have found its perfect expression as Ruth.
This is a mournful, careful and gloomy film. Those things needn't be bad; sometimes they can even be life-affirming and leave you feeling oddly uplifted. But Never Let Me Go is enervating; as I watched, I could almost feel the life being sucked out of me. Which, given the subject matter, might seem strangely appropriate — although it's not, I imagine, what its makers had in mind.
