Never Let Me Go

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

DOWN ON THE FARM: In Never Let Me Go, boarding-schoolers Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan are raised like cattle, not kids. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B ]

Even if you haven't read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, it's clear that Mark Romanek's adaptation of Never Let Me Go springs from the same authorial well as The Remains of the Day. Although it's set in a dystopian past, at a British boarding school where children are raised like farm animals, the tone is melancholy rather than alarmist. The movie amounts to a prolonged sigh.

Shot in muted colors that belie Romanek's music-video past as well as the strobe-lit surfaces of his first feature, One Hour Photo, the new movie is somnolent, at times verging on soporific. Although the circumstances of these 1970s and '80s are radically different from our own, the world looks the same in all but the tiniest particulars, like the metal bracelets the school's students wear to check themselves in and out. It's as if Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley were engaged in solving some playful mystery rather than unraveling the inhumane secret of their existence.

Watched over by headmistress Charlotte Rampling, the children are confined to the school's grounds, told they are raised for a purpose, but not what it might be. The lack of contact with the outside world keeps them in a protean state. Although the movie spans nearly two decades, only Mulligan seems to age; Garfield and Knightley remain overgrown children, struggling with emotions they were never meant to feel.

The understated approach to Ishiguro's (science-) fictional past absolves the movie of the need to roll out space suits and rocket cars; this is a worn world, made of metal and stone, free of technophile fetishism. But Romanek's insistent naturalism undercuts the movie's metaphoric potential. It's easy enough to sink your teeth into the inevitable love triangle as calculating Knightley steals unstable Garfield away from nurturing Mulligan, but the story never drops anchor in the real world. The movie makes you feel, but it doesn't make you think.