Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, has more in common with The Matrix, Children of Men and Logan’s Run than the author’s other celebrated adaptation, The Remains of the Day, though you’d never know it if you watched the film with the volume turned down. Never Let Me Go is a science fiction story that very intentionally defies all sci-fi stylistic clichés, masquerading instead as an introspective, meditative, pastoral English drama. But all this loveliness and civilized behavior masks a monstrous, insidious ugliness. The question is, does the film give us the proper tools to care and the answer, unfortunately, is no.

At an idyllic, remote, country boarding school named Hailsham (appropriately pronounced “hell sham”), we meet Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), three among hundreds, if not thousands of sheltered students who have no parents and no futures other than that which the state has devised for them. Medical science has made it possible to routinely live beyond your hundredth birthday, but to do that, the body’s vital organs must be systematically replaced. That is where Hailsham and a legion of other schools like it come in—they are essentially breeding camps for clones raised for the sole purpose of organ harvesting. As our walking corpses come to fully comprehend their fate and confront their mortality, they must fill a lifetime of emotions, longing and love into a tiny sliver of time.

Director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) has made a luxuriantly beautiful film. Using a palette of browns, greens and grays, he and cinematographer Adam Kimmel have created an Anglophile’s dream. The exquisite splendor of the image, Rachel Portman’s soaring score and the phenomenal casting of some of Britain’s most superb young actors goes a long way in giving Never Let Me Go the semblance of refined sophistication. But this story of love in the face of inexorable fate is largely inert. Despite a stellar pedigree, it never arrests our imagination nor holds our sympathy. It is so focused on conjuring a world of bland routine that it simply forgets to be interesting. Allowing for the fact that the flat, commonplaceness of the whole thing is exactly the point—there is no moralizing about ethics; the matter has been settled and none but a handful of individuals now ever cares to ask if the children are human—it is a suicidal conceit. Movies about banality are, for reasons that are all too clear, often banal themselves.

The most troublesome aspect of Never Let Me Go is its characters’ acquiescence to their fate. They never once so much as question their destiny. Clearly, they yearn to live and love for as long as possible, but they are perfect little automatons, creations bred never to question their creators. In this universe, there is no free will, only predestination. But Logan, as the title of the aforementioned film informs us, was born into no less of a brainwashed society and he ran. This thought to flee never crosses their perfect English brains. Orwell would understand Ishiguro though very few American viewers will. Throughout the film, I kept asking, “Where is the rebellion?!” But the truth is, there is no revolution until there is. Which is to say, until someone decides to step up and say, “I am Spartacus,” there are only cowed sheep. A film about those sheep is perfectly acceptable. However, it comes with inherent narrative consequences and those consequences are that the story lacks the very thing it requires to keep us engaged—dramatic conflict. Without that, we feel no horror or revulsion at the main characters’ mincemeat ends. And if we don’t care what happens to them, we ultimately cannot care for the film. That Never Let Me Go chooses to take place before the inevitable insurrection does not invalidate the film’s premise, though it will likely grate against our innate insubordinate and mutinous tendencies.

Rebellion, it is true, would have subverted Ishiguro’s and Romanek’s larger commentary. You are allowed to feel incensed that no one fights back because the film ultimately turns its probing eye on the reader/viewer. This story is a metaphor of conformity, repression and mortality, and as such wants you to ask: Am I so different? Are you and I not organ donors, giving away pounds of flesh in tiny beige cubicles? If the film’s characters are banal, unexceptional and ordinary, it is because you and I, for the most part, are banal, unexceptional and ordinary. And even if we make something grand of our lives, we still find and lose love, we still make and lose friends, we still die. Taken from a bird’s eye perspective, are our lives and theirs so very different? There is no villain in this story, except perhaps us. But Never Let Me Go, by and large, fails to inspire this meditation because empathy and sympathy don’t stick around long enough to watch the final credits.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Mark Romanek
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins
Rated R for some sexuality and nudity.
Running Time: 103 minutes