Never Let Me Go is probably about as good a job as could be done of translating Kazuo Ishiguro's novel to the screen, but the tone that works on the page is less effective in the theater.
If you haven't read the novel, then I don't want to give away too much of the story (and all of the reviews I've read have said far too much). The narrator is Kathy, who is looking back over her life, and her friendships with Ruth and Tommy, who she's known since they were in school together as children.
We flash back to childhood at Hailsham, and see the early development of the romantic triangle that will dominate their lives together, and we begin to get hints that Hailsham is not just another English boarding school. Headmistress Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling) keeps talking about the special destiny that awaits Hailsham students, and when a young teacher (Sally Hawkins, delivering another blandly inept performance) spells out the precise nature of that destiny, she is quickly removed from her post.
Most of the movie follows Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy from roughly 18 to 28 (they're now played by Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield, respectively), as they enter the career for which they've been trained.
Ishiguro's novel is built on a sharp contrast between the reactions of the reader and the characters to the situation and events, and that contrast is much harder to achieve on screen. Moments that should be heartwrenching fall flat and have no emotional impact, and I think screenwriter Alex Garland reveals too many of the story's secrets too soon (certainly far sooner than Ishiguro does), which destroys the haunting unease, the sense that something we can't quite place is not right here.
The performances are adequate (though it is an act of cruelty to ask Knightley to pass herself off as 18), with Mulligan making the strongest impression. Best thing about the movie, though, is Rachel Portman's elegiac score, which feels like an updated version of Vaughan Williams in pastoral mode.
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