Review of Never Let Me Go (2010) by Shiira — 29 Oct 2010

It's the saddest music in the world. By itself, Judy Bridgewater's "Never Let Me Go" is just another torch song of no particular distinction, it's what Kathy H. brings to the canned performance; her naivety as a listener which makes the ordinary ballad so heartbreaking, when she misinterprets "baby", the singer's plea to a careless lover, as a petition to a baby, in the literal sense, that he/she "never let [her] go".

While the cassette tape plays in the empty dorm room, Kathy H. slow-dances with a pillow, the baby she'll never conceive, in her arms, with Madame watching from outside the doorway, a little bleary-eyed, flummoxed by the young girl's humanity.

In an instant, she knows the "gallery" is just window-dressing. These children do indeed have souls. This scene, more than any from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, demonstrates the profundity of inhumaneness at work here, made all the more strange by the genteel setting of the Hailsham school, whose guardians, despite their advocacy against treating these children inhumanely, still believe that the final solution is a necessary evil.

These unseen forces count on the guardians to poison their minds with propaganda about the world outside Hailsham, and the world inside their bodies.This ignorance; this resignation, that these children have been instilled with all their lives, since birth, made them feeble, made them strange.

The pantomime Ishiguro describes in his Man Booker Prize-short-listed book, an imitation of motherhood which Kathy H. performs in a context so grossly misapprehended because of her own circumscribed purview, is a grotesquerie that makes the girl too vulnerable, too much like a freak.

With the same stiff upper lip he applied to his third novel "The Remains of the Day", the pre-eminent writer of contemporary British fiction has no reservations about putting Kathy H., Tommy D.

and Ruth in tragi-comic situations that serve them up for ridicule. Too bad the film version of "Never Let Me Go" chose to iron out the flaws which made the students less bland. They're maladjusted, but the film wants to ensure that audiences like them.

In the book, Kathy H. had lots of sex with strangers, Tommy D. didn't seem nearly as thoughtful like how Andrew Garfield plays him, and Ruth was a whole lot more machiavellian at Hailsham, and especially at the Cottages.

But most egregious of all, what "Never Let Me Go" loses in the translation from novel to film, is the original meaning of the Judy Bridgewater song, since the filmmaker changes Ishiguro's lyrics by replacing "baby" with "darling", a term of endearment that Kathy H.

associates with Tommy D.. The dystopian film loses its key estranging moment in order to make the girl more relatable to the moviegoer, who can better identify with a girl in the throes of puppy love.

Kathy H. has a better grip on her feelings in the movie than the book, an effect, however, that makes her indistinguishable from any other boarding school girl with growing pains. Instead of Madame, it's Ruth who's the quiescent observer, and like her best friend, she too seems overtly sophisticated and worldly, not at all how Ishiguro envisioned them, his "poor creatures", as Madame later describes them, but in the film, the jealous girl understands Kathy H.

's designs on Tommy D., understands the gist of the song, which gives her the impetus to steal the boy's heart. "Never Let Me Go" is too conventional for its own good. The love story plays too prominent a role in the narrative, at the expense of the dislocative atmosphere which drives the book, but disappointingly, not the adaptation, whose revamped character seem to understand the difference between love and sex, tears and come, in spite of their limited experiences.

As adults, when Kathy H., Tommy D., and Ruth begin to fulfill their destinies as "carers"(Kathy H.) and "donors"(Ruth and Tommy), "Never Let Me Go" pays the price of loving its characters too much.

The filmmaker wants the trio to be savvy about love, but naive about dying, but they seem too smart, so when the former Hailsham students don't seem fully cognizant to the fact that "completion" and death are a matter of semantics with little or no differentiation, it rings false.

They should escape, but "Never Let Me Go" avoids that banality, so prevalent in the third act of so many genre films, especially science fiction, because Hailsham turned them into good little soldiers who wouldn't desert their mission and escape the fate which awaits them.

In one scene, acting on a tip about a boat, Kathy H. drives Tommy D. and Ruth to the coastline, but the boat is purely for sightseeing. Marooned on the sand, nobody seems terribly disappointed that the boat isn't on the water.