FILM REVIEW Never Let Me Go

SPOILER NOTICE:  This film review might tell you more than you want to know.

An exquisite, understated film, eerie and haunting. John and I were both very moved - the poignant story is still floating in and out of my consciousness several days later.  In the future, which has already arrived, and is our current day, society breeds cloned humans in order to harvest body parts and organs for certain unnamed others. 

This is not a science fiction tale.  It’s much too gentle and small in scale.  The author and director have discussed the novel’s theme in larger terms, as a story about the experience of parents who must teach their children about the inevitability of death. 

It could also be read as a story of class.  The privileged owe their health, as well as their rank and status, to the classes below them whose daily work sustains their wealth.  Though body parts may not be the tender, certainly hard labor, lack of access to medical care and education are the price paid by the poverty-stricken. 

I also think it speaks to the issue of the value of human life - as we learn about new genocides, sex slavery, bodily mutilation, death sentences by stoning, and abusive child labor practices world-wide.  We don’t really care, do we.  They don’t really care, do they.  Exploitation is so acceptable. Explain it as meritocracy, theocracy, Hobbes-ian politics, democratic capitalism.

The clones believe all sorts of things about the outside world they will never experience, including that true love between them will buy them a few more years before they must begin their donation schedules. Most of all, the film is about love, perennial as the grass.

The artwork of the clone children in the orphanage is collected for a mysterious “Gallery”, whose purpose is never known.  The children never see an an actual exhibit, just as they never experience the great world and its treasures. The final use of the work, when we finally learn it, reduced me to tears upon the hearing. 

The actors are all superb. Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield play the three clone children, whose lives are intertwined until each “completes” his or her donation schedule. Charlotte Rampling, in a chilling cameo role, is the Matron of Hailsham.

The critics haven’t liked it much: think it’s slow, cold, gives away the surprise too soon, as the novel did not. Pair this with “The Road”, for another dystopian view and a beautiful dark starkness.

The sadness of this film hasn't left me yet.