Movie Comparison

This is the final installment of my blog! I’m back for one last post by popular demand! I finished the book last week, and over my vacation I decided to watch the movie version of Never Let Me Go. The movie came out in 2010 and was directed by Mark Romanek. It stars Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield as Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy respectively. The movie was received fairly well by viewers, and it is rated 71 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, however I feel as though Never Let Me Go is a complex book that can’t be packaged into a movie well, and too many details had to be cut from the film version for it to have the same effect as the novel.

I came into the movie with high expectations. I liked the book, and I had heard good things about the movie! Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong; it is a well-done film, and I probably would have enjoyed it if I had not read the book first. The acting is realistic, and the sets of Hailsham and the Cottages are as I imagined them throughout the book. However, the book goes into so much detail developing the characters and their relationships, and it would be impossible to include all these anecdotes include in the two-hour movie. Some major details had to be cut from the film, and this creates more one-dimensional characters causing me to be less emotionally invested and moved as I was during the book.

A major thing that is cut from the movie is a lot of Kathy’s experience at Hailsham. Memories of Hailsham take up about a third of the book, whereas in the movie Hailsham only accounts for the first 25 minutes or so. In the novel, Kathy takes the time to develop a solid base and backstory for her friendships before moving on to discuss events more pertinent to the storyline. Understandably, the movie did not have as much time for the development of characters through these little events, and I felt that this took away the depth that the characters and their relationships have in the book.

In particular, the movie version skips over many details that develop the relationship between Ruth and Kath. The movie includes one scene of Ruth and Kath playing with horses but leaves out the sections regarding their conflicts in “secret guard” which they create to protect Miss Geraldine, and the pencil case drama that the two have when Kath knows Ruth is lying but stands up for her anyway. These and other small details develop a fragile and complex relationship between the two characters in the book, and I was disappointed that this is missing in the movie.

Instead of focusing on these complex relationships, the movie gives more screen time to the love triangle between the three characters. In the book, I understood that friendship is the main thing that draws these characters together, not their attraction to one another. In the movie version, Ruth and Tommy start dating earlier on and they never break up. Kathy in the movie talks about how from the beginning she was always waiting for Ruth and Tommy to break up so she could have Tommy. In the book this isn’t the case! Ruth and Tommy do break up, and, by Ruth’s request, Kathy helps them get back together. Kathy and Tommy’s love in the novel is quieter; I am not entirely sure that either of them really realize or acknowledge it because their friendships are more important to them. In the movie, the love aspect takes priority.

Both the underdeveloped relationship between Kathy and Ruth and the overplayed romance are tied to a particular motif that is mostly absent from the movie and is my favorite part from the book; the events tied to Kathy’s Judy Bridgewater tape are largely underplayed and changed in the movie. I understand the absence of some of the Hailsham stories to save time, but I feel that this idea is pertinent to the book, and I am surprised and disappointed that it was left out of the movie.

Kathy’s tape plays a very small role in the movie, seeming only to serve to push the romance card by having Tommy give the tape to Kath instead of her finding it herself. In the book, the tape plays a huge part in the development of Kath’s relationships with Ruth when she tries hard to find it for Kath when she loses it, and with Tommy when he looks for a new tape for her in Norfolk. The tape also serves to foreshadow the events with Madame in the novel, when she sees Kathy dancing to the music with a pillow and starts crying. This shows early on that she had some compassion for the clones and that something is wrong with their situation, which turns out to be a major player later in the book. The tape is so important to the novel that the title originates from it! It is hard to believe that its significance is so diminished in the movie.

Even though I do not think that the movie did the book justice, it did do some things right. The plot was more or less sequential and not changed too much, and specific quotes from the book are used verbatim in the movie. One particularly cool thing I noticed about the movie is the color scheme. Everything is in muted colors- blues, browns, and greys- and I think that this captures the mood and tone of the story perhaps even better than the book does through descriptions.

All in all, the movie version of Never Let Me Go is okay. It gets the point across that the book is trying to make, however, I feel that too many key details are left out for it to become as meaningful to the viewer as the book was to me. This is understandable because the movie can only be two hours long, but don’t get your hopes up too high about this film version of Ishiguro’s book!

Well, this is it! Thank you so much for following my blog for the past month! I hope you enjoyed it, and please reach out to me if you decide to read Never Let Me Go to tell me your thoughts on it!