Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is one of my favourite novels of this past decade. It’s sad and science fiction, and romantic and reading that had both an intellectual and emotional effect on me. Music video director (Johnny Cash’s “Hurt”) Mark Romanek’s film adaptation is an able and pretty attempt at translating Ishiguro’s words into pictures, but it seems an adaptation at the literal level. Sometimes this approach works—John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon is literal and a worthy classic—but, here, though experiencing the story for a second time isn’t unpleasant, it’s not revelatory, either.
Most everything in Never Let Me Go is polished, from the cinematography to the acting, yet there are moments when grime would have worked better than beauty. For example, there’s something too model-and-catwalkish about a scene of a skeletal Keira Knightley barely walking down a long and antiseptic hallway. Her character is struggling for life despite being a decaying sack of pre-purchased organs. She’s not supposed to be modeling the latest fashions. Indeed, she says as much in another scene, reminding her co-clones of a reality that may or may not have an effect on who they are: to find their originals, they should look in the gutters. Cue also the last scene, of bits of plastic stuck to a wire fence, blowing in the wind. It’s simply too shiny.
One of the strengths of Ishiguro’s novel, and my favourite aspect of it, is Kathy’s first person narration. When the book first came out, I remember reading a few reviews that criticized Ishiguro for a drop in his writing quality (compared to The Remains of the Day). I think this “drop” is what breathes life into the novel by letting us look into Kathy’s soul, thereby showing us that she has one, one of the fundamental questions about the book’s clones. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to translate this into cinema. As a result, the film’s characters, and especially Kathy, are distant, too flat. The novel relies on Kathy’s memory and how she describes what happened to create her personality. To lose that is to lose a lot.
There is, however, one genuine and breathtaking shot in Never Let Me Go. It’s not on the pier or on the beach in a shell of an old ship. It’s in front of a stopped car, in the glare of headlights. (Unintentional shades of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identificazione di una donna?) The scene itself is overwrought, one of the film’s worst, but the image—of Kathy embracing Tommy—is the one that sticks with me.
Read the book, then revisit it by watching the movie.
This Defeasible Life 