Never Let Me Go: Poor Unfortunate Souls

It’s no fun being a clone. It’s especially no fun living with the knowledge that you’ll one day be slaughtered piecemeal so more fortunate humans can commandeer your vital organs. No, this isn’t Michael Bay’s action flick The Island, it’s Never Let Me Go, the adaptation of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest work. Any gloomy British cautionary tale about cloning will inevitably reference Huxley’s Brave New World, but Ishiguro, a Japanese-British transplant, bears this fully in mind, taking a subversive approach to the problem of cloning. Rather than describing the technological and political landscape of a world that has sanctioned a self-perpetuating holocaust, Never Let Me Go distinguishes itself as a character study, focusing on one individual, Kathy H., and the scant relationships and earthbound pleasures she holds dear during her short time on earth.

The book was met with wide critical acclaim, named the best novel of 2005 by Time and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clark Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s a distinguished novel, but the film, although as faithful an adaption as they come, lies comparatively limp on its reels. How could a film that paid such ardent attention to duplicating the characters, plot, look, and tone of the book ultimately fail? Screenwriter Alex Garland and director Mark Romanek somehow managed to ignore the theme of their own movie: even something that’s cloned will inevitably develop its own identity.

Try as they might, a movie can never be a book, and sometimes a story needs big changes if it’s going to make it on the big screen. Take for example, Disney’s The Little Mermaid. This film was a homerun with kids and a financial boon to Disney, and yet the developers took very real liberties adapting the story from the page to the screen, changing the original plot, characters, the tone, the ending. First off, Disney gave the little pesca-tween a name—Ariel—and in the end let her keep her legs, marry her hunky landlobber, and live happily ever after. Oh, and it’s a musical. But in the original fairy tale, the sea witch cuts out the mermaid’s tongue, she feels knives stabbing her feet whenever she takes a terrestrial step, and her man-meat falls in love with another woman. This nameless mer-gal dies and becomes sea foam on the ocean for three hundred years for the chance to one day experience the love of a human man, long after her beau is dead, of course.

Disney basically raped and pillaged Hans Christian Anderson’s original story, but somehow, audiences were pleased, and no one aimed invectives at Disney for betraying Anderson’s vision. Without significant alterations, this animated classic may not have been such a smash hit, spawning innumerable sequels and a Broadway musical, if it had borne its original existential ending. The children may have felt a little cheated, and might not have begged their parents to purchase as many Little Mermaid nightgowns, sleeping bags, and lunch boxes. The same is true of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Quasimodo dies), Pocahontas (dies) …they might really be on to something here! Indeed, Disney is always pointed about its end goal to make movies, and they invent new characters, situations, and events that shine in the feature film format, rewarding audiences and investors alike.

While the creators of the Never Let Me Go film weren’t exactly writing a toe-tapping musical for tykes, their job to adapt the written word from the page to the screen was no less challenging or important a process, and by playing it safe and treating Ishiguro’s manuscript like an instruction manual, they ultimately failed at their jobs. A novel in the post (post)-modern age exists almost entirely for its language. Authors have near-universal control over their structure, their narrator, their motifs, style, and voice. The only thing that restricts a fiction author is the need to use a recognizable language, and in the case of J. R. R. Tolkien and Anthony Burgess, a skilled author can invent this, too. But while there are any number of ways to shoot a film, every narrative movie, no matter how avant-garde, must follow the rules of film grammar if it wishes to be understood. Each of us is fluent in the language of film, even if we don’t realize it. This is part of what makes bad movies so predictable and why it is so hard to surprise an audience. With Kathy H. narrating her experiences first-hand, it is the language of Never Let Me Go that feels so alive in the book, and so dead on screen, even though they slap on some voice over narration and explain explicitly what the rest of the movie tries to communicate by more subtle means.

Not surprisingly, the most memorable scene in the film is an invented one that was implied in the book but actualized in the film—a scene where we get to watch a character make a “donation.” Visceral, visual, and palpable, scenes like these are undermined by laughable cutaways, banal film conventions, and flimsy support for this alternate universe. The haircuts were a real highlight, and there were some respectable performances, but you’re better off sticking to the book on this one.

Director: Mark Romanek
Writer: Alex Garland