"Never Let Me Go"

TELLURIDE -- Mark Romanek's "Never Let Me Go" is definitely an art object, but is it a work of art?

Expertly acted, impeccably photographed, intelligently written, even intermittently touching, the film is also too parched and ponderous to connect with a large audience. Fox Searchlight is hoping for awards consideration for the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed novel, but this will depend on the reviews, which are likely to be split between those who consider the film a bleak masterpiece and others who find it straining so mightily for aesthetic perfection that it fails to provide a gripping narrative. In any case, the downbeat nature of the material will prove a challenge at the box office.

Ishiguro's tale centers on the relationship of three young people -- Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley). They have no last names because they are not ordinary people. Gradually, we learn that they are scientific specimens, created in the laboratory and raised in order to provide their organs to desperately ill patients. Ishiguro's novel was praised for translating his typical moral and psychological concerns to a science fictional tale. "Never" is not set in the future but in a parallel universe where medical experimentation has been taking place without the knowledge of most ordinary people.

 

The first problem with the movie is that it never completely lays out the logic of this parallel universe. The cloning process itself is shrouded in mystery. Screenwriter Alex Garland probably wanted us to share the limited knowledge of the characters, but this idea could have been maintained while providing just a touch more crucial clarity for the audience.

 

Another problem is that the theme of the dangers of medical experimentation is a rather tired mainstay of speculative fiction, going back at least to "Frankenstein," one of the first horror stories to underscore the risks of tampering with Mother Nature. This theme is less startling than the filmmakers may realize, which would be less of a problem if the message were not delivered in such a solemn, portentous manner.

What does save the film intermittently is the poignancy of the love story, which is bolstered by the skill of the performances. The film opens at a boarding school, where three excellent child actors -- Isobel Meikle-Small, Ella Purnell and Charlie Rowe - embody the three protagonists, and Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins contribute vivid supporting turns as teachers. Even at this early stage, a romantic triangle is brewing. Kathy and Tommy are drawn to each other, but the manipulative Ruth interferes and tries to claim Tommy for herself. When the characters grow up, the three stars perform impressively. Mulligan is luminous as the leader of the pack, and Garfield plays his more simple-minded character with marvelous expressiveness. Knightley manages to create a three-dimensional villain.

The most affecting theme of the film is the notion that even among these scientifically engineered creatures, love provides meaning to their shortened existence. Mulligan and Garfield play their parts with such conviction that we get caught up in their doomed romance.

The design of this familiar but slightly surreal universe is well rendered, and some of the visual compositions are haunting. But the pacing is fearfully slow, and the elliptical storytelling works against audience involvement. The issues of medical ethics are undeniably timely, but dramatically, the film, rather like the beautiful Frankenstein monsters on display, only comes alive in fits and starts.

Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Opens: Friday, Sept. 17 (Fox Searchlight)
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins, Isobel Meikle-Small, Ella Purnell, Charlie Rowe
Director: Mark Romanek
Screenwriter: Alex Garland
Based on the novel by: Kazuo Ishiguro
Producers: Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich

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There is something intriguing and yet exasperating about this strange, muted film, adapted by screenwriter Alex Garland from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, and directed by Mark Romanek. It's a classy and composed British drama, with hardback cinema production values, based on a premise that has already been extensively explored by genre and science-fiction writers. This premise is disquieting, though Never Let Me Go may be too tasteful to be scary, and yet too contrived and unreal to be tragic. And it has to be said that there is sometimes a "fashion shoot" quality to the styles and visual compositions.

Being scary or tragic may not be precisely the point, though. Where Never Let Me Go succeeds is in being a dreamlike parable of Britishness –   a particularly miserable Britishness, a Britishness which submits numbly and uncomplainingly to authority, a pinched Britishness which has an unshakable loyalty to unhappiness, and, with the coming of death, regards not raging against the dying of the light as some grim sort of social or municipal obligation. Never Let Me Go reminded me of Winston Smith's wife in Nineteen Eighty-Four, joylessly insisting that marital sex was "our duty to the party".

Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley play Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, who have grown up together in a boarding school in a kind of alternative-reality England, which, but for occasional touches of modernity, could be the late 1940s or early 50s. The children are being groomed for a special, self-sacrificial destiny in this weirdly Sovietised society, and when they realise what that destiny is, it is to have far-reaching repercussions for their relationship, which becomes a distorted love triangle.

The secret purpose which the government have assigned to them is not revealed with the flash of drama, horror, or vertigo that it might have in conventional sci-fi treatments. In storytelling terms, this is a bit disconcerting. But the very point is perhaps that it is humdrum, workaday, embedded in the tatty fabric of everyday life, and just something else to be depressed about. The secret – hidden in plain sight – is mysterious, horrifying and yet accepted: it is like death itself, that drab fact in all our lives which is just as mysterious and horrifying, and yet treated by all of us, every day, with a fatalistic, unthinking shrug. Despite the heavy weather, Never Let Me Go never delivers a cloudburst of emotion or revelation, and yet it has ideas; it resists categorisation, and it lingers in the mind.