September 21, 2010 01:30PM EDT
Best in Show: Andrew Garfield
Rising star Andrew Garfield finds childlike truth and adult heartbreak in the film adaptation of the bestseller Never Let Me Go.
Those who were lucky enough to have caught the 27-year-old British actor Andrew Garfield in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), where he easily held his own with Heath Ledger and Christopher Plummer, or even earlier in his award winning performance in Boy A (2007; TFF 2008) weren't scoffing when it was announced that he was taking over the Peter Parker role for Sony's reboot of Spider-Man (2012). He's already proven both talent and watchability on the big screen. With his Hollywood career rising, he's come full circle: he was born in Los Angeles, before moving to England as a child.
The Oscar hopefuls Never Let Me Go (now in theaters) and The Social Network (opening soon) will give audiences two last major chances to get acquainted. After that he’ll be swinging into household name status on webs shot from his wrists.
The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro once described his work as "unfilmable," but that adjective has never scared filmmakers away from best sellers. Mark Romanek directed the adaptation of Never Let Me Go, and if it's not quite unfilmable, it definitely resists synopsis without giving too much away. Carey Mulligan stars as Cathy H, who narrates the story set in a dystopian alternate Britain where medical advances have raised life expectancy with some thematically haunting consequences. Cathy recalls her childhood with Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Garfield) at a boarding school named Hailsham. Their school hides the purpose of their unfortunate existence from them even as it carefully prepares them for it. This highly controlled environment camouflages a terrible open secret with benign-sounding coded vernacular. The kids talk about "donation" and "originals" and “deferment” and "completion" and noble career option as "carers" or “donors” without ever fully grasping the meaning. The three friends are forced to confront the reality of their situation, and feelings for each other, only after they leave the shelter of school to fulfill their adult purpose.
The children become adults, but childhood lingers on. The child actors linger on in the adult faces of the familiar stars, too. This isn't solely a result of good casting, but also a credit to the screenplay and performances that understand the way a purposefully repressed upbringing can stunt or warp natural maturity.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Garfield’s work as Tommy. As a child, Tommy was soft and sensitive but prone to temper tantrums after bewildering rejections by peers or teachers. Adulthood mellows the tantrums, but he’s still childlike; Garfield even runs and stands with the adult approximation of an awkward gangly youth. This telling physicality never feels performed so much as lived-in and ever present. Tommy also still needs coddling. When he’s confused or needing confirmation, he’ll repeat lines or glance quickly to Ruth or Cathy. It’s a sort of double-checking, as he’s never learned natural self-reliance. Garfield doesn’t condescendingly mark Tommy as a dimwit so much as someone who is undeveloped in intellect, and who lacks confidence in creative thinking. He’s slower to grasp every impending truth that you can see coming in the wide-eyed sadness that Mulligan conveys or the slow boil self-loathing captured by Knightley. When he seeks “deferment”—the meaning of which is best left discovered in the film—he does it with the innocence of a child, with full naïve investment in a big dream.
Garfield gets the sweet, malleable needy disposition—and thus the tragic arc—just right. In Tommy’s big climactic breakdown late in the film, which echoes his first tantrum, the audience is jolted with cathartic release. It’s the kind of big carefully prepped moment that reads all wrong out of context in a movie trailer (though of course they included it) but plays perfectly guileless and moving in context. He’s a boy who never grew up, but this one can’t fly away. When he finally understands, his heart breaks spectacularly. The deferred growing pains have arrived with unimaginable force.
Click the poster to find movie times near you for Never Let Me Go:
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