Man Booker winning author (Never Let Me Go was shortlisted) Kizuo Ishiguro said the marketing material of both the book and the film on which is based caused many headaches. The reason? How much to give away.
One of the things I loved about the book which starts off in an English boarding school is that there is a slow growing sense that there is something not quite right about the school, it's staff and pupils. The reveal comes half to three quarters of the way through.
The trailer to the film, I felt, gave too much away although I do concede that knowing the story may make me read more into it than someone coming at it blind. I've always felt that these sort of stories should be presented in the order and at the speed that the author intended and I worried that much of the impact of the reveal would be lost if the film plunged in to quickly.
However, what I didn't reckon on how much that prior knowledge of the book would have on how intently I would engage with the film.
As already intimated, it starts off in a school and follows three friends Cathy H, Ruth and Tommy through to their early adulthood. At its heart is a love story with the three friends forming a triangle but with an inventive tragic twist that raises a whole host of questions in itself.
And I found it desperately sad to watch. Snot-crying, stifling sobs sad. In part, I'm sure, because I knew what was coming.
Scriptwriter Alex Garland (28 Days Later) who is a friend of Ishiguro has captured the essence of the book. Of course somethings have changed and the time at school has been cut back in order to translate it to suitable film length but it is pretty much as I remembered it. There are few books that have moved me like Never Let Me Go.
Key to the success are the central performances by Carey Mulligan as Cathy, Keira Knightley as Ruth and Andrew Garfield as Tommy. Mulligan in particular gives an amazingly sensitive performance as the pushed aside, yet stoic Cathy. Knightley perfectly captures the charming, yet manipulative Ruth and Garfield the innocently naive Tommy.
There is one scene in particular, towards the end, in which you feel as if Garfield's Tommy has let go of a whole life times worth of pent up emotion and it nearly tore me apart to watch. It's one of those scenes - Fanny's response to John Keats' death in Bright Star is another - that has haunted me since.
For me it is a powerful piece, beautifully shot and portrayed.
Afterwards there was a Q&A with Ishiguro in which he talked about the process of seeing his book turned into a film. Those, like me, nervous of a much loved novel being messed with will be interested to know that he never had any intention of writing his own screenplay - a process he said that would be too arduous and painful, having to go back, unravel everything and then put it back together again.
He's known Garland a while and they met often when he was working on the novel and Garland 28 Days Later and they would bounce ideas of each other. They agreed that he would write the screenplay and he did so without any film deal in place.
I think if I hadn't enjoyed the film quite as much as I had then listening to Ishiguro and how accepting he was of the process of turning it into a suitable film would have appeased me. The way he described it reminded me of when I was studying post-structuralism at University, the theory that each reader brings their own interpretation and once someone else has read a piece it no longer belongs to the author.
Ishiguro particularly loved what the actors brought to the characters and how they saw things in them he hadn't considered before. He mentioned specifically Garfield's Tommy how up to the point I mention earlier he has blind faith that it is going to work out OK.
If you go and see Never Let Me Go there is a snippet of context put as part of the title sequence and what you need to know about that is that it is entirely due to a US test screening response in which many in the audience thought that such practices actually went on in England.
Once you've seen the film or if you've read the book you'll understand why this misunderstanding got such a laugh.
UK Rotten Tomatoes gives it 68% based on 139 reviews and 73% of users like it while Metacritic 69% based on 37 reviews with an average user rating of 7.5/10.
I'm giving it 88% because I loved it and it's going straight on my DVD list.
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