For every second of its hour and forty-three minute runtime it is clear that Never Let Me Go is a carefully crafted work that its filmmakers took very seriously. The results are right up there on the screen. The soft lit, idyllic English countryside is beautifully shot for the entirety of the film. The camera moves skillfully and unobtrusively along with a who’s who of talented actors that make up the film’s cast. You’ve got solid hands, already well established in the business like Charlotte Rampling and Keira Knightley as well as hot up-and-comers like Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield. Even the child actors that play the younger versions of their characters are all chosen well for their skill. Not a single one gave a performance that was embarrassing or amateur. The screenplay was adapted from a book by well-respected novelist Kazuo Ishiguro by Ishiguro himself and the equally successful novelist/screenwriter Alex Garland. All of the pieces were in place for this to be a deeply effective, Merchant Ivory-eque success of filmmaking and British restraint. But, unfortunately, the story told is so inherently stupid that all the care taken in the world during the production wouldn’t have done much good at all.
A love triangle involving three boarding school students, Kathy (Mulligan), Ruth (Knightley), and Tommy (Garfield) is the main focus of our story, and the film follows them from childhood right into young adulthood. Kathy is the quiet, sympathetic one, Tommy the put upon dimwit, and Ruth the jealous conniver. What we’re introduced to first is the creepy conformity that defines life in this particular institute. The children move in straight lines, scan themselves into rooms using tracking bracelets that they always wear, consume the same meals in the same portions at the same times, engage in the same regimented activities as everyone else. The school resembles an assembly line in a factory more so than it does an institute of learning. And when the children delightedly partake in a garage sale of broken, dirty, cast aside toys with all the enthusiasm of little ones told that they’re going to go to Disneyland, things start to seem more than a little fishy. These toys that they’re buying flat out suck. Why are they so happy? Haven’t they ever even been outside of the school? Turns out, the answer is no, and that’s where the main conceit of this film lies. These aren’t just normal children, and this isn’t an exact recreation of our world. This film is set in a slightly alternate universe where sickness and dying has been all but wiped out by an extensive organ donation program wherein clones of people are grown, raised, and later harvested once they’ve aged into maturity. More or less, things are never spelled out so directly. These students that we’ve been following are the clones, this hidden away boarding school is where they are put until they are old enough for use. Early on in the film a ball is hit over the fence and outside of the school’s property during a playground game. When a new teacher asks the children why nobody hops over and gets it they relay to her horror stories about what has happened to the few people who have dared venture outside of the school’s fences. It’s some really gruesome stuff, the sort of story that makes you start to wonder. Clearly somebody has gone to great lengths to create narratives for these children and instill them pretty deeply into their consciousnesses. Don’t question, accept your fate, keep yourself healthy, and for God’s sake, never leave the school. The story of the kid who went over the fence is played as weighty and important; it seems to be the genesis for where our plot is going to go. By introducing a lie that has never been challenged, the unspoken promise to an audience is that they’re about to watch the story of that very thing happening. Starting now, one of the students, probably one of our three protagonists is going to start doubting the validity of the stories, challenging the authorities, and breaking free from the oppressive lifestyle that these children have been raised in. Instead this story leads to nothing. Instead we’re told these ludicrous tales and then watch helplessly as they’re never questioned.
Instead what we’re given is the mundane drama of a teenage love triangle and another series of squandered jumping off points for a plot that never ends up going anywhere. The triangle starts when a young Kathy takes pity on Tommy, the outcast of the school who gets picked last for every team and picked on by all the other students. She reaches out to him and he in turn buys her a cassette tape at the depressing yard sale as a token of appreciation. It looks for a second as the start of a beautiful love story. That is, until Ruth interjects herself. Tall, pretty, and outgoing, there is no reason why Ruth should be interested in Tommy, and once she sets her sights on him it’s inevitable that he will forget all about his budding relationship with Kathy. The devious part is that the genesis of the relationship doesn’t seem to have any root in an attraction that Ruth has for Tommy, but instead in the opportunity she sees to take something away from Kathy and assert her dominance. The film then jumps into their post boarding school lives, where Ruth and Tommy’s relationship is still in tact, and Kathy is still hopelessly alone. The kids move out of the school and into a sort of halfway house between school life and constant organ donations that they call “the cottages”, probably because they consist of a grouping of cottages out in the country. They have a couple of awkward interactions with real people in a nearby town, they have goofy hairdos, they swoon over terrible television shows; basically they continue to live passive, pitiable lives. But during this sequence of the film they are introduced to a couple of more tall tales that could go on to have profound effects on their lives. The first, which turns out to be true, is that the kids can apply to become “Carers”, sort of caretakers for the other donors while they’re going through their operations. Carers get their own donations, and therefore their own demises, pushed back a couple of years while they do their duties. The second story, which may or may not be true depending on spoilers, is that a couple of donor kids can get reprieves from their donations if they can prove, unequivocally, that they are in love. A third jump in time, which appropriately shunts us into the third act of the film, finds Kathy as a Carer and Ruth and Tommy split up as a couple and a couple of surgeries into their donations. When circumstances find them reunited, Ruth makes a confession that she is sorry for keeping Tommy and Kathy apart for all those years, that she feels like they should have always been together, and that they should apply for the reprieve together, as their non-relationship must certainly qualify as true love. And finally, halfway through the third act, we get the conflict of the film. Will they mesh as a couple? Will they qualify for the reprieves? Do the reprieves really exist at all? If at this point in the film you still find yourself caring, then you have a much longer attention span than me.
I guess some commentary should be done on the acting in the film. Kathy is the narrator of the film and the character that gets the most screen time, and thankfully Mulligan’s portrayal of her is the strongest performance here. This is the third or fourth film that I’ve seen her in and as always she is skilled, radiant, and just awesome to watch emote. She can tell an entire story with the slightest facial twitch, and she does everything that would be possible to inject interest into passivity. Unfortunately, playing the most passive character in a very buttoned down, passive film is a tough position to be in, and watching her pull out every trick in her arsenal to keep the viewer interested and engaged eventually starts to feel like watching someone trying to get blood from a stone. I felt for her. After impressing me with his performance in The Social Network, Andrew Garfield really disappointed me here. He seemed to be to be trying too hard to keep up with the effortless physical storytelling of Mulligan and consequently over emotes and just appears to be nauseous for most of the film. It didn’t help much that his character was an underwritten dunce with no discernible redeeming qualities. But after being so impressed with his natural yet expressive performance in The Social Network just a week earlier, I couldn’t help but get bummed that he wasn’t able to elevate the material he was given. Knightley isn’t given much to do but be snotty and stir the pot for much of the film. But later on, when she begins to feel regrets, she does get a bit more to chew on and is serviceable in the role. I never thought that her casting was a negative, but I also never got a real sense of who her character was. I would like to give a special bit of recognition to Sally Hawkins who showed up very briefly as the new teacher at the children’s boarding school. Her character is a dead end, but she impressed me in the small moments she was given. Her character seems to be the only one who has a moral problem with the whole operation of cloning people and cutting out their organs and Hawkins makes the role resonate with an uncanny ability to appear concerned and conflicted every single second that she is on screen, no matter what she is doing. Unfortunately her character shows up, tries to get through to the kids and inform them of their dire fates, and is made to disappear: all in about ten minutes. And her attempts, once again, never lead to any sort of intellectual awakening in any of the characters. Another missed opportunity.
I was with this movie as it set up its world. It was shot well, the acting was good, and I was interested with how the characters would deal with their tragic fates. Unfortunately, once things had been set up, I started to ask some logical questions of the plot that it didn’t have any answers for. I kept asking myself “why”. Why are things done this way in this world? How could this plan possibly be economically viable? If they can clone humans, why don’t they just grow usable organs rather than feed and house people like cattle for their entire young lives? And even if you accept that this is all practical, where are all of the conscientious objectors? What sort of morality could allow these atrocities to occur? Other than the brief time Hawkins’ character tries to reach out to the children, nobody is seen trying to stop the absolute barbarity inherent in birthing who knows how many people and cutting them up for spare parts. The other teachers in the school all seem like nice people, and yet they are all complicit in Nazi level genocidal murder. How do they deal with it? What do they tell themselves? Why is what they do worth it to them? None of these questions are ever addressed! And why, for the love of God, don’t any of the kids ever try to run away? Nowhere in the film is it even considered. Is it because of a childhood story about someone being cut up in the woods when they tried to go over a fence and get a ball? They’re going to be cut up anyways! They spend most of their time worrying about their demises and scheming about how they are going to avoid them, yet they never once talk about just running away and refusing to be killed. They are given pretty much free reign after they leave the school. They drive cars. They walk around in cities. And it never occurs to them to take off? These characters have no survival instincts whatsoever. They will accept any fate that they are handed, whatever it is. How does that make a good story? How am I supposed to care about their pain and their plights when there are obvious answers to their problems that are never addressed? The entire premise of this story is flawed. This film is broken on a conceptual level.
And in addition to just not making very much sense, this movie is boring: so very boring. When, in the third act, the three main characters travel from their hospitals to a beached boat beside the sea in order to have a conversation about their possible reprieves that they could have just had where they were sitting in the first place, I was beside myself with boredom. Why did I have to watch them travel all the way out there to have this talk? That was twenty minutes of my life stolen. And why would they travel so far to see this boat in the first place? It was just an old boat! I was waiting for some sort of mention of its significance, but it never came. And that’s how this one can trick you up. This movie pretends to be smart and thoughtful, and it looks so nice and it’s so well put together that it almost pulls it off. It’s got all these proper looking British people traipsing about in beautiful surroundings and having very serious looks on their faces; surely there has to be something here with some weight. But the more you really pay attention to what is happening on the screen the more you realize what a stupid, stupid film this is. There is no allegory here. There are no interesting, complex questions raised. What real world practice am I supposed to tie this story to in my head and reach a new understanding of? Is the act of cloning people and cutting them up until they are dead supposed to make me rethink my stance on stem cell research or something? Give me a break. Is this school where people are raised as cattle supposed to make me pontificate on the systemic nature of the public school system? That’s certainly a stretch. But I’m trying here. Surely I wasn’t supposed to come away just caught up in the characters and caring about their stories. I was never given a reason to care about them. They were never developed as real people. They were stupid, defeatist, hollow shells of human beings. Yes, I can understand that killing people for any reason is horrible: duh. But that’s not a nuanced enough of a concept for a film to build itself on. If you want me to care, then I need to know why I should be particularly horrified at the thought of these particular characters’ possible demises. And I wasn’t, at all. Off with their heads.
