CAREY MULLIGAN, KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, ANDREW GARFIELD IN NEVER LET ME GO

Love among the clones

Before I watched this movie at a New York theater,* a young woman appeared in front of the screen and said, "Hi, I'm Carey." Applause gradually tipped me off that she wasn't a staff member come to warn us the projector was jammed, but Carey Mulligan, the film's costar, unannounced. She said she loves to see "real people" watching the film and added, before bouncing off, "Remember this is a love story. Forget the sci-fi stuff, it's just bollocks!"

Well, would that one could. And would that the sci-fi stuff did not turn the love story into maudlin treacle. But that's not how it is, Carey. I'm sorry.

This is an adaptation by Alex Garland (known for tougher stuff like 28 Days Later and The Beach) from a novel by Kazuo Ichiguro set in an alternate universe where major illnesses have been dealt with through creating a race of human clones who are raised simply as the source of organ transplants. They make a series of "donations," having organs removed, and then after one or two or three or four of such involuntary emasculations they are ready for "completion," i.e., to die. All this happens in the Seventies. And seems completely absurd as material for a tender, tragic romance. Perhaps it works in the novel, which I have not read. It succeeds here only in being alienating and confusing, and making the filmmakers' and actors' well-intentioned efforts all for naught. Some conceits are just too contrived to work in a movie, and that goes for Never Let Me Go from first to last. Ardent fans of Ichiguro -- and his novel was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize -- will doubtless be enchanted by the restrained, touching performances, the too-pretty Merchant Ivory-esque cinematography, and the sick-making story. I am not such a fan and was merely alienated and repelled.

It all begins with an idyllic, but weird, English boarding school called Hailsham, where an unusually corpse-like Charlotte Rampling presides. The focus is on young Ruth, Kathy and Tommy, played charmingly by, respectively, Ella Purnell, Isobel Meikle-Small, and Charlie Rowe. They are to be a triangle. Somehow Ruth is linked to Tommy, a spacey kid given to explosions of screaming rage and mocked by other students for being artistic. Actually Tommy and Kathy are the real lovers. But that only develops when it's too late; Kathy was too shy to approach Tommy when they were young. A teacher, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins), who's immediately let go, tells her class the truth, that their function in life is to donate organs. Hailsham is such a hushed, unnatural place, you know something quite creepy is afoot from the first frame, so this revelation is hardly a spoiler, though apparently this whole business is held back much longer in the novel than the film, which might make a considerable difference.

Hailsham somewhat resembles the world of the 1988 gay film The Everlasting Secret Family, about a network of powerful homosexual men who keep a stable of attractive youths perpetually on hand. Both stories concern imagined situations that never could or should come true. Both are worlds of hidden control and whispered rumor. At Hailsham, the kids spread myths about the horrors that occur to those who wander outside school boundaries. And there's a key one emerging later that if a boy and girl fall deeply enough in love, their "donations" may be postponed. Not a rumor but a fact is that some donors are chosen to be "carers," whose "donations" are postponed while they assist donors recovering from their operations. The grown up Kathy (Mulligan) becomes a "carer."

The Hailsham episode, with its accomplished and natural young actors, is set apart from the film's two other moments, which occur when the kids are young adults living in "cottages," and some years later when they're grown up and have begun their "donations." The "cottages" phase is tantalizing because it's too short. This is when the kids are developing sexually. There's a scene where one girl catches another going through a pile of pornography mags thrown away by Tommy (now played by Andrew Garfield). In another scene, they're watching a TV soap and respond to it totally without irony, because they know nothing of the real world. Hailsham's Miss Emily (Rampling) has continually told the children they are "special." They are innocents, and ultimately perhaps saints. But they are also only clones, and once they're young adults they understand that. They sometimes look for the real adults they are clones of. (There are odd rumors about this too.) Another couple at the cottages has sex. Tommy and Kathy are left out of the picture: Ruth has taken over Tommy. Kathy is blooming into a future "carer."

In the "donation" section of the movie, "carer" Kathy comes across Ruth (played post-Hailsham by Keira Knightley), now in pretty ragged shape following several "donations." Later she tracks down Tommy, who is a robust "donor," still seemingly hale and hardy after three "donations." It's here that Kathy and Tommy realize their childhood crush has never gone away and they are now in love. Much detail here about Tommy's long-preserved drawings. His belief is that the kids' drawings were saved at Hailsham to find which ones had the depth of soul to be deeply in love. He and Kathy find "Madame" (Nathalie Richard), the lady at Hailsham who kept the drawings, to ask, obviously rather belatedly, if their proof of true love can get them a serious delay in further "donations."

For some the film's ethereal atmosphere will make for magical wistfulness and thoughtful tears. For me a series of completely unacceptable premises are further vitiated by what are obviously mangled fragments of the 304-page novel, which consists largely of reminiscences by the 31-year-old Kathy, who has repressed all her memories of Hailsham till she meets her childhood friends again. Part of the discomfort, clearer upon reflection, is how little Knightley, Mulligan, and Garfield match their youthful counterparts. In particular Garfield puts on an elaborately childish and sweet manner not in any way foreshadowed by Charlie Rowe. He goes a little overboard during the adolescent "cottage" phase, and never lets it go. Mulligan, in contrast, seems a little too old. (She is, however, a subtle and extremely appealing actress.) Needless to say, an alternate world in which life expectancy went beyond 100 in the Fifties is hard to get your mind around, especially when it all seems to hinge on the morally unacceptable idea of a race of clones and the silly idea of "curing" illnesses with organ transplants rather than genetics or preventatives. Ichiguro's novel might be a different and perhaps quite fascinating experience.

*Landmark Sunshine, sadly shuttered in 2018.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.