Never Let Me Go
Mark Romanek (2010)
In Ivy Compton Burnett’s Darkness and Day, the ancient Sir Ransom Chase approaches death without any belief in life after it:
‘“I believe I shall be as I was before I was born.”
“It is interesting to see that a man can face that, when he is actually confronted by it.”
“It does not sound as if he had much choice”, said Sir Ransom.’
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, the principal characters are laboratory creations raised in order to give their body parts, and sooner rather than later their lives, to human beings in need of organ transplants. Their situation is an intensification of, and a metaphor for, the transience of human existence, their acceptance of their fate analogous to our acquiescence in our mortality. This is made very obvious at the end of Mark Romanek’s film of the novel, written by Alex Garland: the pivotal character, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), stands looking out at a leafless hedge with bits of plastic bag blowing in the black branches, and muses that perhaps the donors’ lives weren’t very different from those they helped save or, at least, prolong – that ‘Perhaps we all feel we’ve not had enough time’. The ‘bits of plastic sheeting and torn carrier bags’ come straight from the closing page of the novel. The words don’t and, so clear is the moral of the story, that they’re superfluous – although they’re beautifully spoken by Carey Mulligan, who narrates throughout.
This anxious in-case-you-didn’t-get-the-point finale is in fact uncharacteristic of the film, as is Rachel Portman’s excessively dignified and tragic music, which cues us in unnecessarily on how we’re meant to feel. The score and the final message are at odds with Mark Romanek’s rather daring avoidance of the easily dramatic in most of what happens on screen. The film moves very slowly, and without developing momentum, for some time, at least until Kathy and the other main characters, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), have become their adult selves. Kazuo Ishiguro executive- produced and it’s clear from interviews he’s given surrounding the film’s release that he was considerably involved in its making. You get the sense that Romanek wanted his approval – a mistake because Ishiguro, as the creator of the material, comes at it from a perspective so different from that of the audience. The result is sometimes rather like a series of respectful recreations of scenes from the novel that lack a life of their own. (A sophist might argue that chimes with the predicament of the characters but I wouldn’t believe him.) Romanek’s previous film One Hour Photo was weakened by the director’s imposing the sad bareness of the protagonist’s life on every scene, including scenes not seen from the protagonist’s point of view. In Never Let Me Go, the palette is predominantly drained blues and browns, alternating with clinical whiteness (the cinematography is by Adam Kimmel). There’s little sense of the boundary of the clones’ world or its articulation with any other. This may be to stop us asking questions about the relationship between the two. I can’t remember whether the novel did but the film doesn’t make clear, for example, how the sequestered education that Kathy, Tommy and Ruth receive prevents them reading about or seeing images of siblings or parents or any way of life different from their own.
Nevertheless, the lack of detail about the set-up of this dystopian universe and Ishiguro’s preoccupation instead with its psychological and emotional implications for the characters mean that Never Let Me Go is sci-fi of an unusual and, to me, unusually interesting kind. Legends on the screen at the start of the film explain that a medical breakthrough in 1952 allowed human life expectancy to be increased by a hundred years. In reality, Crick and Watson discovered the structure of the DNA molecule at about the same time and the system in place for keeping people alive longer is based on the production of cloned organisms who, as soon as they reach physical maturity, begin their work as donors, their organs removed one by one. They usually ‘complete’, ie die, after three or at most four donations. The scale of the donor production industry is never made clear but we learn eventually that the education at Hailsham, the school attended by Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, was innovative and relatively enlightened. (We don’t see any of the other clone factories but Hailsham is a handsome building in an isolated part of the English countryside: the exterior shots are of Ham House.)
The only way that a clone can defer their destiny is by becoming a ‘carer’ for other clones, as Kathy does. But she and her close friends get wind of a rumour that ‘deferral’ is also possible, for a few years anyway, if a clone couple can convince the authorities they are in love – as Kathy and Tommy are. At Hailsham, the students were encouraged to paint and write poems; each year a mysterious, vaguely Gallic woman turned up to select their best work for ‘The Gallery’. When Tommy and Kathy apply for deferral, they know they’re probably too late: Tommy has already made two donations and didn’t get into making art while at Hailsham, though Kathy did. Nevertheless, they seek out and find ‘Madame’ (Nathalie Richard), who’s now sharing a house in a seaside town with Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling), the retired headmistress of Hailsham. When they meet the two women, Kathy and Tommy, who’s belatedly put together a portfolio of remarkable drawings and illustrated stories, learn there never has been a system of deferral on the grounds of love, that the selection of art wasn’t, as Tommy has hoped, designed to gauge the depth of students’ souls – and to verify claims of love. (Here again the human analogy is easy to see: the persistent sense we may have that our aptitudes for or responsiveness to art should mean that we deserve and are capable of a life beyond the physical, that we’re more than packets of biochemicals.) Encouraging the Hailsham pupils’ interest in art, it transpires, was an experiment designed to try to persuade hostile human society that clones had ‘souls’. Shortly after they receive this devastating news, Tommy makes his third donation and completes. Kathy at the end of the film tells us she’ll make her first donation in a week’s time.
Some people in the Filmhouse audience seemed deflated by the bleakness. Perhaps they thought the title and the trio of good-looking young actors signalled a less unconventional romance than the one they got: this was Valentine’s Day, after all. In fact, the love triangle is one of the movie’s stronger elements – as is the fact that being as human as the clones are means having the capacity for jealousy and self-serving manipulation, as well as a propensity for art and love. While they’re at Hailsham, the self-confident, extrovert Ruth steals the psychologically fragile Tommy from Kathy, the one who really loves him, and creates a rift between the two young women that lasts several years, during which Ruth and Tommy have a sexual relationship. It’s only when Ruth is weakened by her donations that she comes clean to Kathy, whose own relationship with Tommy takes off from there. I can see why Never Let Me Go is neither a commercial nor much of a critical success but if you don’t see the performances of Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield you’ll have missed some of the best film acting of the last year, some of the best I can remember seeing at any time from young British actors[1]. Mark Romanek deserves much credit too for the casting and his direction of the children who play younger versions of Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small), Tommy (Charlie Rowe) and Ruth (Ella Purnell). The physical and spiritual resonances between these kids and the three adult actors are very rich.
Keira Knightley’s acting doesn’t have the depth or quality of Mulligan’s or Garfield’s but that works for the character she’s playing and she’s very persuasive as Ruth, especially good when she chatters on to Kathy, getting down the hospital corridor with a Zimmer frame after her latest donation. In the smaller parts, Monica Dolan, in her one scene as a nurse on a donor ward, creates a remarkably complete character: the nurse’s blend of affability and inurement to her place of work is just right. In her last scene, Charlotte Rampling expresses quietly and powerfully the headmistress’s regretful awareness of what Hailsham has nurtured in Kathy and Tommy. I was less taken with Nathalie Richard’s Madame: both her presence and her readings are too deliberate. Sally Hawkins is good again, as Miss Lucy, the Hailsham teacher who tells the students what awaits them in later life (and who departs the scene very quickly as a result). Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson have small parts as other youngsters whom the main trio meets up with in the late adolescence part of the story.
It’s depressing to look at Andrew Garfield’s filmography on IMDb and see there’s nothing there between this picture and The Amazing Spider-Men, scheduled for 2012. Is he entirely spoken for until his Spiderman contract has run its course? Garfield is an outstanding talent. It’s a privilege to watch his rendering of Tommy’s volatility and (in Miss Emily’s words) ‘big heart’. He conveys the character’s emotional intelligence and eccentricity through movements and shifts in expression that are magically natural and penetrating. His original line readings take you by surprise repeatedly – even in the course of a single line, he’ll strike one surprising note and then, as this hits home and you absorb it, another. Tommy’s yells of despair on the journey back with Kathy from their visit to Madame and Miss Emily are such a predictable climactic moment that it’s nearly impossible for the actor concerned to make them work but Garfield does. This outburst underlines both the fact that Tommy is a showier part than Kathy and how remarkable Carey Mulligan’s work is here. While Tommy rails against his fate, Kathy is the epitome of the passive acceptance that lies at the heart of Never Let Me Go. At a superficial level, Mulligan may appear to be doing the same thing throughout. If you look deeper, you see that this is an amazingly controlled and unselfish performance by a twenty-five-year-old. She’s genuinely radiant and she has exceptionally eloquent eyes (she can switch the light in them on and off effortlessly). Her slightly heavy gait here is subtly expressive of Kathy’s trapped situation. The strength and delicacy of the connection between Mulligan and Garfield in the scene when Kathy and Tommy first go to bed together are beautiful. They brought tears to my eyes several times – partly because the people they’re playing and their circumstances are affecting, but mainly because their acting is just so marvellous. I can’t recall that happening with a new film since I watched Sean Penn in Milk.
Postscript
Twelve days later, I saw Never Let Me Go again. Sally had read the book in the meantime, was keen to see the film and the Filmhouse had just one more show this week – Saturday morning. I worried that the things I liked so much would disappoint on a second viewing. Instead, I found myself taking back most of the negative things I wrote above. I must have drowsed during the middle sequence the first time round. It’s here – especially on the outing to see the woman Ruth hopes may be her original – that there are interactions with the normal world: ordering food in a café that echoes the role play at Hailsham (I’d forgotten that ends with Tommy’s lovely whispered ‘Thank you’ to Kathy for helping him out); peering through the window of a travel agent’s to try and see the original; watching an American TV sitcom, which triggers a memorable exchange of cross words between Kathy and Ruth. The world created by Mark Romanek and the cinematographer Adam Kimmel, although it has an inherent melancholy, was more tonally nuanced than I’d realised when I first saw the film. Things I’d positively disliked – Nathalie Richard as Madame, the score – weren’t as bad as I’d thought. The school scenes built strongly – all in all, the piece seemed not an anxiously respectful rendering of the novel but organic and self-sufficient. Sally’s right that it makes a big difference if you come to this film with the book – or a recent viewing of the screen adaptation – fresh in your mind. If you’ve just read the Ishiguro, you can read what’s on the screen much more easily. If you’ve just seen the film and are anticipating the wonders of the ‘Completion’ part of the story, everything that comes before seems to be a preparation for it. And, to my amazement, the good things were even more gripping and elating than they seemed last week – above all, the riches of Andrew Garfield’s performance as Tommy.
[1] Garfield in fact has dual British-US nationality and was born in Los Angeles but the family moved to England when he was three.
14 and 26 February 2011