What I liked best about Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo
Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is also what I liked best
about the book, which took what could so easily have been just
another s-f or “dystopian” fantasy and put it instead into the real
world. Admittedly, it is not our real world but a sort of
weird, alternative reality that is constantly pushing at the edges
of our residual mimetic expectations by its resemblances to our
own. Its world is unmistakably England, but an England which, for
some reason presumably connected with the fictional scientific
advance that is both the novel’s and the movie’s central premise,
took a different sociological and cultural turning half a century
or more ago and is now both disturbingly and fascinatingly unlike
itself. In fact, this feature of the movie is even more striking
than it is in the novel, perhaps because of the visual echoes,
lushly and evocatively photographed by Adam Kimmel, of familiar
things which, I think, makes this one of those rare movie
adaptations that manages to improve on its original.
One reason is the movie’s semi-documentary quality. This
is an England in which the sexual and cultural revolutions of the
1960s appear never to have happened but which instead managed to
preserve a slightly rancid version of the public-spiritedness and
willingness to sacrifice that were characteristic during the period
of the postwar socialist government of Clement Attlee — along with
a class structure more rigid even than the pre-war one. People who
thought that post-war “austerity” was the price that had to be paid
for progress have continued to dominate, culturally and
politically, and so arrived at a similar consensus about medical
progress. Everyone seems to accept that the nobility of the
alliance between medicine and social thought to wipe out disease is
so unquestioned as to justify even the existence of an underclass
of clones, seen by non-clones as only half-human. Even the clones
themselves, kept in semi-segregation from the rest of society, seem
to agree — at least until they are 30 or so and it is time for
them to “complete” the process of donating their organs to their
overlords.
In the novel, the word “clone” doesn’t appear until about
two thirds of the way through; in the movie it never appears. This
is just one of the ways in which we are denied the easy
satisfactions of utopian fantasy and the cheap sense of superiority
that comes with it. That a clone has no word for clone seems no
more remarkable than that a fish, if it could talk, might have no
word for water. It is taken for granted. The three clones at the
center of the drama, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley)
and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), are among the most privileged of the
clones, however, having been sent to Hailsham, a typical British
boarding school of the 1950s, to be taught useful skills, and even
some limited acquaintance with humane studies such as art and
literature, until they are old enough to have their organs
“harvested” for the benefit of the fully human characters who
remain only shadowy presences both in their lives and in our
observation of them.
The three are involved in a love triangle that appears at
first to have nothing to do with the social and political
implications of their lives as ambulatory bags of spare parts for
others. At age 12 or so, shy Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small) is drawn
to Tommy (Charlie Rowe) who is a new boy at Hailsham and is being
picked on by others. But her bolder and more sexually advanced
friend Ruth (Ella Purnell) comes between them and steals Tommy
away. The relationship between Ruth and Tommy somehow survives
until they have grown up and become Miss Knightley and Mr.
Garfield, respectively, and they become sexually active, though
they both remain close friends with Miss Mulligan’s Kathy. Years
later, when Kathy becomes a “carer” — that is, a clone suffered to
live a little longer than others in order to help them through
their various “donations” — she again meets Ruth, now on the verge
of “completing,” who wants to make it up to her for stealing Tommy
away. “You two had real love and I didn’t, and I didn’t want to be
the one left alone,” she confesses.
On one level, we inevitably wonder about the conscience of
a clone, but on another the question of who loved whom seems to
them of the utmost importance because of a rumor among the clones
that if two of them could prove to the authorities that they were
truly in love, they could be granted a “deferral” to live a few
more years of their lives together before meeting their clone-fate.
Whether this rumor is true or not is the only real point of
dramatic tension in the movie, so it would be unfair of me to give
it away, but Cathy’s and Tommy’s quest for a deferral is eventually
what leads them and us to an inevitable confrontation with the
moral vacuity at its center. The surprise for us, though obviously
not for them, is how much their world looks like ours after all.
The exercise in alternative history has been for a reason. It’s not
to show us the dreadful fate that awaits us in an apocalyptic
future; it’s to remind us that that future is here and
now.
And maybe it always has been. Imagine, for example, a
world like the one God made — if you will permit the hypothesis
for the sake of argument — composed, as it is, of the fortunate
and healthy on the one hand who have rich, long and fulfilling
lives, and those who are doomed to pain and early death on the
other. But this world differs from God’s in being man-made,
deliberately designed by human intelligence to keep separate the
sheep from the goats. Obviously, it would be intolerable. And yet
we live in such a world and do not, cannot consider it so. Kathy’s
concluding reflection about Tommy, that “I was lucky to have had
any time with him at all,” becomes the prelude to her wondering if
their lives have really been so very different from the lives of
normal people who, when they come to the end of them may also feel
as she does: “We haven’t had enough time.”
Finally, the movie can’t quite escape its
presumptive s-f and propagandistic origins. Insofar as it can be
and even must be read as a political statement about denying full
humanity to some for the benefit of others, it concludes with the
unchallengeable banality that we must not allow the state to treat
people like this — a reassuring “message” that allows us to go
home with a sense of our own righteousness and immunity from any
implication in the human tragedy we have witnessed. Yet at the same
time, like the best utopian fiction, like 1984 and
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, for example, we also
come away from it with the uneasy sense that, like the clones, we
are already living the nightmare ourselves and just don’t know it
yet. It is an ancient commonplace that death makes us all equal,
but the pop-cultural eternity on offer in Never Let Me Go
suggests the long vistas of perspective the saying gives us on our
lives which may never be fully explored.
