Never Let Me Go (2010)

directed by Mark Romanek
starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley

This movie ripped out my heart. Really, I don't think there's a more eloquent way to put it. I have no excuse for the slobbering mess I am right now. I knew what this movie was about going in. Love triangle between three clones destined to give their organs and their lives - this movie was practically manufactured from tears.

I decided to sympathize with Keira Knightley's character the moment she started acting questionably - I guess I like to side with the character set against the main protagonist. (Not the antagonist, necessarily, but the one who's just sitting to the side poking them with a stick.) It's like I feel like there must be narrator bias involved, or something. I don't know. It was difficult, admittedly, to enjoy her perspective, but Keira Knightley did an outstanding job. It was fun to see her in the role of the atoner - flipped around, a bit, from another one of her prominent roles.

But this story belonged to Kathy (Carey Mulligan). Her loneliness was overwhelming - even in the brief happy segments, she seemed almost out of place in another's embrace. It's this feature that draws me to her - not that she was wronged, or that she was thoroughly good throughout it all - but that she bore a tragic destiny while looking out of windows and into books, uncomforted by thoughts of requition. (Apparently that's not a word. I'm using it anyway.)

Then again, it is this same fear that haunts Ruth, and it is what motivates her desperate grasps at love. While Kathy bore her fate quietly for the majority of the movie, Ruth embraced it in her final surrender. In some ways I'm still more fascinated by her.

But if I'm fascinated by Ruth, I'm still stuck firmly in Kathy's shoes.

I realize I haven't quite mentioned Tommy yet. Poor Tommy. He was beautifully played by Andrew Garfield, a lovely mess of confusion and longing and frustration. The moment when he explores the beached ship with childlike enthusiasm, only to be distracted by a nagging pain in his side, is the perfect illustration of their short lives. In some ways he is an accessory to the two girls, controlled largely by their actions; yet he has his own share of perspective and emotion.

This story has less to say about the ethics of cloning and more on the nature of humanity. (The ethics of raising fully human children and then harvesting their organs is never really up for serious discussion, in my experience.) You are so caught up in the complications of love and jealousy amidst childhood and youth that you forget about the rest. As Kathy points at out the end, we are all completed someday. We are all living under death sentences, spending limited time with those around us. Their situation merely magnifies ours.

The tragedy of the title is the last thing that lingers on me. Since childhood, they are taught to let each other go; it is this art that Kathy has mastered by the film's end. But are we all not, to an extent? Our shared fate is both to let go and be let go. The echoed love songs may tell us otherwise, but life, like Hailsham, takes no exceptions.