Never Let Me Go

I'm trying to do a creative journal for English and this book, so I was looking up the movie in an attempt to figure out what the field described in the last paragraph of the book might look like, and I found a clip of the end of the movie. And I cried.
It's funny how the movie could do that for me when the book couldn't. I think that while Ishiguro's writing style lends itself well to a sort of detachment and distance that works with some of the central ideas of the book, those same qualities make it harder to truly connect with characters on an emotional level. Books, generally, make me cry because of the reactions of characters to trauma; I connect, generally, very strongly with the denial stage of grief in writing. On the flip side, this means it's fully possible for me to think a book is very sad, but not cry; without that reaction, it just doesn't hit home in the same way. For example, when Sirius died, I bawled like a baby, because of how Harry reacts, his realization that he won't hear or see Sirius ever again. Dumbledore's death, on the other hand, just wasn't all that sad , because that extreme reaction wasn't there.
Movies work in a slightly different way than books, so I think that while I require the same thing in order to cry for a movie, it can be expressed very differently. In a movie, I still need to see that reaction, but since movies have to show character reactions visually instead of descriptively, I need to see it in their face, and hear it in the music. Because of this, I think the scene at the end of the film, when Tommy is about to Complete, ends up being more effective than the book ending as a tearjerker. Even if that scene were included in the book (in the book, Kathy leaves before Tommy Completes), I don't think it'd be as sad for me. I can't fully connect with Kathy and Tommy in the book; their relationship isn't real for me, because of the detachment in the writing style. In the book, it just doesn't seem like Kathy cares for Tommy as much as she must, because the way she describes everything just don't fully convey the depth of the feeling. In the movie, it's possible to see how she's acting, instead of being told of it second-hand, and that makes all the difference. Even though all I saw was that one last scene, the relationship is there. The sadness of dying is there.

(Wow, I may have to use parts of this for my journal...)