Although it is based on a great novel; although it is wonderfully acted; although the sets and locations are perfectly beautiful and amazing, Never Let Me Go was not as good as it could have.
Carrey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley star in this tragic story of a sci-fi, futuristic England in the past (weird, I know, but that isn’t the problem) and they are the perfect cast for these three roles. I do not know any other actors who could have done a better job. Carrey plays the heroine and we truly, deeply feel for her. She always does a good job with whatever she is given. Andrew plays the conflicted love interest for these two women. And Knightley, well, this is the first time we actually are supposed to not like her. She plays the evil bully Ruth who takes Tommy (Garfield) from Kathy (Carrey). Played by almost anyone else, it would have been terribly hard to watch, but Keira should definitely play more roles like this.
I loved the music in this movie. Yes, I will be talking about the music again. I thought that it was one of the best composed music of last year. Romantic, hopeful, and emotional, Rachel Portman gives me everything I’m looking for in a movie like this. Simply listening to the music on its own makes me cry.
And the story is still fantastic. It is a futuristic world where medicine has become so advanced, that the average life a human is past 100. But get this; it is taken place in the past. It isn’t in the future. It takes place in a parallel universe in the year 1952. It is very captivating and interesting, and I loved it.
Now, if I loved all of these things so much, why did I not like it? Simple answer: too much sex and nudity, too much exposition and not enough fluidity, slow editing where it needed to pick up and not drag on in a boring way, and the directing. That last note is something that I am always keen on looking for and I need one second to explain.
Most people blame specific departments for failures in areas where as I try to see the directing of the film as a whole. A bad director can have many good people around him working on his film, but that does not make the director a good director. Because he has all of the pieces and they are all good and beyond what some might expect, but a bad director won’t know how to combine these pieces of the puzzle into an articulate and fashionable way. And that is where Mark Romanek fails. He doesn’t know how to make these puzzle pieces fit so he smashes them together and hopes his viewers don’t know the difference. He made me feel one way and then something happened and we are now forced to go another way, and I never knew where I should be emotionally in the film.
The movie had everything going for it: great script, great novel it was adapted from, great cast, great music, great sets and art direction. But this man couldn’t combine them into a masterpiece. And some of my readers may think why I said too much sex. Another simple answer: if it doesn’t need to be there, it shouldn’t be there. And those two sex scenes did not need to be in there. Pure and simple.
If you want to see this movie for the acting or the romance, go ahead and you may still be pleased. But as a piece of art, it falters in one way that is pivotal: direction.
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