Never Let Me Go (Sunday, September 19, 2010) (119)

I will be very careful here with the film Never Let Me Go, as I never read the highly regarded book and don't have any emotional connection to the story, beyond what I saw on the screen. I will say that one thing that baffles me about the film is that the trailer totally gives away the entire story and even some important details that are only revealed in the last ten minutes. I really don't know why they did this - I don't think knowing major plot points going into the thing enhanced my viewing experience. Mostly I was just waiting for these revelations to happen, thinking the whole time that somehow the trailer was cut in such a way that it was not as straightforward as the marketing department made it look. Alas the film was exactly as simple as the trailer.

The story here is about an orphanage for kids who we quickly find out are part of a national organ donation program in Great Britain (in some alternate space-time universe). They are all clones of people living in the world and the idea is that they will be able to donate three or four organs before their bodies expire and they die. The story follows three kids, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightly), who are friends and sometimes lovers. Tommy and Ruth hook up early, though Kathy and Tommy probably have a closer connection. The three remain friendly for about a decade until they grow up and grow apart.

The structure of the story is pretty simple: The first act has the kids in their school, Hailsham; then the second act has them moved to a sort of half-way house where as young adults they live in a cottage in the countryside preparing to either become organ donors or caretakers of organ donors (like Kathy, who will also donate her organs ultimately); finally the third act has them out in the world either getting cut up for their organs or helping others.

Throughout the film they are constantly looking to see if they can find the original person whose genetic material they are based on. This connects to the rather boring theme of whether or not they have souls and whether or not they are real people (or simply organic things that grow organs for transplants). I gotta be honest and say this was not at all compelling or at all original. This could have been some SciFi film from 60 years ago about whether or not a robot was human because it too had some sort of emotional life. Who cares?

Director Mark Romanek's work here is really pretty terrible as he telegraphs the emotions and the symbolism of each and every moment with the most ridiculous objective correlatives. We see garbage blowing in the wind just after Ruth goes on a long rant about how they are "modeled on trash and garbage" (oh - I get it!). When Kathy feels isolated in the cottage, we see her in big, wide shot sitting alone in the middle of emptiness. Ugh.

There is the root of an interesting discussion here - a post-modern question that comes up in the first act (and rather fades away by the end) about what is the nature of these kids existences if they are just created to be destroyed. They are given only certain amounts of information about their situations and are given a very limited language set to better control them. This is very similar to what Giorgos Lanthimos does in Dogtooth, but it's a lot simpler and dumber. By the time the film ends, it doesn't really matter that there was this interesting opening.

This is an interesting concept for a story, but it's done so ham-handedly and so boringly that it's really not all that interesting. On top of this, if you watch the trailer, you basically see the entire film - and that's only two minutes long! There is almost no depth in this film and no real emotional interest in the characters. Ruth is always a bitch; Kathy is always a smart geek who is emotionally distant; Tommy is sorta dim and child-like. They are like this as kids and they remain like this as adults. They don't grow at all. Maybe this is what the story is about - being denied the tools of socialization, they are emotional outsiders. But that's not really all that interesting either.

Stars: 2 of 4