Never Let Me Go

Poor old Never Let Me Go. A measured adaptation of one of our finest writer’s finest novels played by the cream of British acting, it should have been, at the very least, this year’s Atonement. But it has been eclipsed, by The King’s Speech (the most universal English heartwarmer since Chariots of Fire) and a remarkably strong crop of other releases (True Grit, 127 Hours, Black Swan, Gnomeo and Juliet), and will probably miss out on the audience it deserves.

Perhaps the film is too subtle for its own good. A suggestive parable that extrapolates the prospect of human cloning with chilling authenticity, it follows Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), three young innocents who meet at a mysterious boarding school called Hailsham where the pupils wear electronic tags and don’t have surnames. The boarding school itself – cloistered, ordered, bubbling with rumours and envy – has layers of philosophical symbolism. It might represent the cosy idealism of childhood and the potential challenges for the over-protected to survive in the real world (a sweet café scene captures the lighter side of this). It might represent the more ambiguous reassurance the rituals of religion offer: as in The Truman Show and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, the protagonists are fed horror stories from a young age to stop them from stepping outside the boundaries (though, unlike The Truman Show and The Village, nobody tries to escape). Sally Hawkins’ teacher figure, a rare rebel, is spirited away from the school for telling the pupils what will happen to them once they leave Hailsham, prompting an eery defence of conformity from Charlotte Rampling’s formidable headmistress (“The tide is not with forward thinking”, but “with the entrenched mindset”).

Their universe is full of awful, Orwellian euphemisms like ‘possibles’, ‘donations’ and ‘completions’, where art and love are objectified (indeed, one becomes the currency of the other). Mercies are scarce: in the film’s most heartbreaking scene, the pupils of Hailsham are treated to a ‘sale’ of toys children from the real world no longer want. Distant parents recur in Ishiguro’s fiction (the older Mr Stevens treats his son like a fellow member of staff in The Remains Of The Day; Christopher is abandoned by his parents in When We Were Orphans; Ryder’s parents fail to turn up to his concert in The Unconsoled), but here they are completely absent, leaving the youngsters with a distorted, materialistic understanding of love and affection.

The questions the film raises are disarmingly existential. Is it better to be exposed (and resigned) to the grim reality of one’s own shelf life all along, or are unfounded morsels of hope to be treasured, even if they prove to be false? Is it better to die young, or alone? Is it enlightened to have a system where certain people are born to give up their organs to eliminate disease and allow others to live longer, or the opposite? There are no right answers and the film doesn’t presume to provide any.

Mulligan, Garfield and Knightley, three of the crown jewels of British acting, acquit themselves very well. Mulligan is lucid, sweet and reasoned, whilst Garfield’s low-key gauche charm is scorched with a Romantic temper. There is a scene where the two of them go for a walk in the woods where Tommy can’t quite bring himself to say that it is Kathy he loves rather than Ruth. It is, like the scene where Anthony Hopkins refuses to show Emma Thompson the book he is reading in The Remains Of The Day, a fleeting chance to take an emotional risk, but missed. Knightley, whom it seems increasingly fashionable to dislike, is rather good in a weighty secondary role, her selfish, affected precocity yielding to fragile, helpless guilt (there is one particularly convincing scene in a hospital corridor).

This is a tender, quietly provocative piece that stays faithful to the understated spirit of the book, but one which unquestionably works as a film in its own right. Kazuo Ishiguro, with his hazy first-person narrators and immaculate sense of English reserve, is not an easy writer to translate to film, but this is an admirable, at times gut-wrenching adaptation that deserves to be seen. I wonder which of his novels will be next. Perhaps The Unconsoled with Daniel Day-Lewis?