Monday at the Movies - February 9, 2015

Welcome to the first “Monday at the Movies” of the new year.  Just in time for Valentines Day, a movie about a love triangle, though I defy you to find anything romantic about it.

Never Let Me Go (2010) – I don’t know anything about the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, so I was instead drawn in by the impressive cast list – Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield as boarding school chums who fall in love and seek atonement for wronging each other as children. But Never Let Me Go is not Atonement, that lush and lusty heartbreaker; it is, on the one hand, absolutely heartbreaking, albeit with a relentlessness that Atonement (for all its hopefulness and aspirations for forgiveness) lacked.  I really can’t articulate thoroughly enough just how unceasingly bleak this film is, and if that’s the point, then well done.  The central trio are all very credible, as are the child performers who play them at age 10 or so.  If you want to go into the film completely unspoiled, stop reading now, because I need to talk about a few things. First, the central conceit of the film is that its protagonists, as revealed about thirty minutes in, are genetic clones being bred for their organs, and if that’s not uplifting enough for you the moral of the story is, “It doesn’t matter how much time you get with the people you love, because you’re all going to die anyway, and it wouldn’t have been enough time even if you had a hundred years.”  The film, though unindictably crafted in every way, leaves such a gaping void in the soul of the viewer without offering anything to fill said void. We can’t even take solace in the frankly gorgeous direction by Mark Romanek, because it’s in service of this desperately despondent narrative. It’s a punishing pace to get to a finish line at which point the narrator ruminates on how little she has left and reveals that that, too, shall pass.  I truly wanted to like this film – I wanted to weep with it when I heard the premise – but instead I found myself unable to feel anything other than a crushing, Werner Herzog-like nihilistic despair.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, almost certainly with a review of Kingsman!