Never Let Me Go (to a Bad Movie)

Whether you found it “disquieting” like Margaret Atwood or “weirdly funny” like Louis Menand, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” is, it’s safe to say, one of the more esteemed novels of the past decade. The conventional wisdom is that lighter books—“Gone With the Wind” and “The Godfather”—make for better movies; it’s the adaptations of serious literature like “The Great Gatsby,” “Revolutionary Road,” and “The Scarlet Letter” that tend to disappoint, and occasionally traumatize, viewers. Based on its newly released trailer, the film version of “Never Let Me Go” may prove the the conventional wisdom wrong. I love the casting of Charlotte Rampling as headmistress Miss Emily and Carey Mulligan as the narrator, Kathy. Even the inevitable presence of Keira Knightley—who seems to have replaced Kate Winslet as the go-to actress for literary adaptations—seems right (I’m less sure about her playing Zelda Fitzgerald). Though most critics praised Ishiguro’s book, at least one dismissed it as “a triumph of style over substance.” It strikes me that the task of the film version, which is written by Alex Garland, who penned “The Beach” (the book, not the screenplay) and directed by Mark Romanek (the man who brought us this and this) is to avoid slipping into this sort of superficiality. For now, I choose to remain optimistic.

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