‘Never Let Me Go’ chronicles 3 childhood friends’ lives into adulthood

"Never Let Me Go" takes place in a monochrome British boarding school wherein each gray, regimented day blends dully into the next.

The school is called Hailsham, but it might also be called Charlotte Rampling's Dour School for Expressionless Children Living Hopeless Lives, and you can guess, from Rampling's look of merciless authority (Judi Dench was unavailable) that nothing good goes on there.

And you have to guess because "Never Let Me Go," adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's equally withholding novel, is sly about doling out the details of the school's dark secret.

A secret we'll respect. So we can't say exactly why the children are leading hopeless lives, but it goes slightly beyond the fact that they're British (that's a joke, but one the movie and Ishiguro, who wrote the essential English repression text "Remains of the Day," takes seriously).

It's within spoiler/disclosure boundaries to say that the children occupy a quasi sci-fi dystopia wherein they're being trained for a role in British society that is less than full and rich.

The movie follows three of them - two childhood sweethearts and a jealous interloper - who grow into adults as Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, respectively.

You couldn't find three better actors on either side of the pond (to say nothing of Beijing or Bollywood), so it's a disappointment to see the talented cast try so hard to breath emotional life into this sterile movie.

Part of the problem is mechanical; the movie is adapted from a novel, wherein Ishiguro could visit the psyches of his characters and describe a bond of love that grows as the characters journey from childhood to adulthood. On screen, Mulligan and Garfield simply don't share enough screen time to make us feel that connection.

The other problem is tonal. Director Mark Romanek gives us two hours of modulated despair - an attempt, I suppose, to replicate the novelist's moody prose. It wears you down, and begins to affect the way you see the characters - as docile figures, disinclined to fight for their own future.

On this side of the Atlantic, filmmakers deal with this particular sci-fi situation differently. In the American version, the lovers hijack a Camaro to smash through the walls of their dystopia, and machine-gun their malefactors. It's not as subtle, but "Never Let Me Go" could have used a little Michael Bay, and maybe a joke or two.

That's what's wrong with the movie. What's right with it, what resonates, is the spectacle of children being raised, perhaps created, for the benefit of others.

The movies shares the implicit sense, evident in movies as disparate as "Wall St. 2" and "Winter's Bone," that an older, establishment generation is operating at the expense of the succeeding one. It's a theme that could, and probably should, catch on.