Screen Machine

Review: Never Let Me Go

In the alternate reality of Never Let Me Go, society has struck upon a marvellous corrective to the frailties of the human body: the breeding of human clones. Once their bodies have ripened, these clones are available on demand to supply vital organs to non-clone “originals”. While most of the clones are reared in battery farms or dingy factories or some such, a few are raised free-range at a boarding school in rural England; they are kept healthy and tolerably happy, given a smattering of education, and sheltered from the truth of their grim situation. Three of these lucky clones mature into polite, photogenic adolescents played by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley. While the systematic exploitation of the clone population continues apace somewhere in the distant background, the trio become caught-up in their own small-scale drama of love and betrayal.

At first I thought Never Let Me Go was going to play up the age-old convention of the non-humans who are more “human” than the real humans. This device, whether it features robots, clones, androids, aliens, vampires, werewolves, apes or witches, is one of the most robust of all science-fiction and fantasy tropes. The usual approach is relatively simple: incite our revulsion towards a non-human person or species (the aliens in District 9, for example, or the replicants in Blade Runner), then reverse the polarities to reveal that the humans are barbaric or ignorant, while the non-humans are noble and sympathetic. Thus the non-humans can usually be a metaphor for almost any disenfranchised or marginalised social grouping, and, when done well, this technique produces a salutary unsettling of categories. In fact, because its unnatural protagonists are self-evidently sympathetic and ensouled, Never Let Me Go mostly shies away from this particular rhetorical use of non-humanity. Instead, the film meditates on a different theme, a theme more peculiar to a story about creatures raised in social isolation: the loss of innocence (cue Hollywood strings). The clones are ignorant by virtue of overprotection, helpless, unrealistic, but endearing—much like children—and the film climaxes with the tragic shattering of their illusions. It’s the last step on their path to a slow, brutal death (read: adulthood).

Alas, though, the grand thematic statement is undercut by a sorely predictable conclusion that is only the last in a sequence of botched “big” scenes. The script is lazy (especially Mulligan’s by-the-numbers voiceover) and the “stirring, emotional” score is left to make up the difference. Director Mark Romanek can’t seem to decide whether to make the film look postcard-beautiful or hospital-drab and ends up going for an unconvincing blend of the two. The upshot is that it’s not hard to think of films—Pan’s Labyrinth and Atonement, to name two recent examples—that make much more satisfying use of similar thematic terrain. Never Let Me Go is superficially competent and coherent, but it is nevertheless a failure. This seems to be a hallmark of big-budget adaptations of popular literature. (I should note that my thoughts on the film as an adaptation are purely speculative: I haven’t read the Kazuo Ishiguro novel.) To make an unkind comparison, Never Let Me Go’s seemly, shallow fidelity to the source reminded me strongly of Zack Snyder’s awful Watchmen. Somehow this kind of adaptation simultaneously translates and eviscerates the original text, resulting in an anaemic, vacuous experience.

The irony is that Never Let Me Go argues for the spiritual equality of “copied” and “original” humans while itself feeling like an unnatural “copy” of an “original” artwork. I don’t mean to imply that adaptations are bound to fail: all-time greats including Hitchcock and Kubrick have built entire careers on successful adaptations, and, particularly in the digital age, filmmakers across the globe are doing innovative and exciting work with reappropriated texts. Besides, entire libraries have been written on the fallacy of notions like originality and textual sanctity. The problem, actually, is not the desecration but the veneration of the source text: it is Never Let Me Go’s very adherence to an “original” that causes it to fall flat as drama, as science fiction, and as social allegory. I suppose the most interesting thing about the film to me was its eminent adequacy, its sheer tastefulness. It left me with a powerful sensation of nausea—the same nausea I get from watching the glassy-eyed monstrosities in Robert Zemeckis motion-capture movies. So it’s hard for me to recommend Never Let Me Go. I’m not sure it has a soul.

Yosh is a creative writing major at the University of Melbourne. He cries at sad films.

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