Never Let Me Go: All in the genes

With Never Let Me Go, one gets a soppy, hormonal teen drama with Keira Knightly as irritating as ever.

There was always something dull about Merchant Ivory productions; the movies were atypically British in the sense that they were stilted, hum drum  and oh so lightly spiced. And now with Never Let Me Go, where one would expect the English penchant for reticence to produce a subtle  yet profound film, one instead gets a soppy, hormonal teen drama with Keira Knightly as irritating as ever.

The advent of genetic engineering has been followed by breakthroughs in cloning and has led to far greater life spans and humanity being nearly disease-free. Of course this ‘healthy living’ is predicated on countless clones donating their vital organs, ‘completing’ in the process. The clones are reared in boarding school-like arrangements and, in one such institution, Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Kathy (Knightley) and Ruth (Carey Mulligan) are pre-teen residents.  Soon, a love triangle is established with Kathy asserting her relationship with Tommy, while Ruth quietly harbours feelings for him well into adulthood. The trio is carted off to live on a farm, awaiting their first donations. Certain complications arise as Kathy begins to harass Ruth about Tommy, prompting the latter to leave the farm to train as a ‘carer’, a clone responsible for their convalescing fellows. There is not much in the way of plot to this film which moves linearly from decade to decade, the only excitement is built up by a possible ‘deferral’ for the clones thrown in. Otherwise the story is slow and tepid; its promised profundity barely felt.

Any emotion evoked in the plight of these clones is through Andrew Garfield’s performance as the adult Tommy. A simpleton with artistic leanings, he is at once heartbreaking and pitiable, and Garfield’s winning performance makes every emotion tangible. The questions surrounding the debate on human cloning — such as those in Bladerunner — are crystallised in Tommy. Garfield has already given a great turn in The Social Network, and one is eager to see what he does in Spiderman. Knightley, who has resigned herself to either doing the Pirates of the Caribbean or appearing in every single English production, is grating and her come-uppance, sadly devoid of pleasure. Mulligan, the narrator of the film is wooden to the extreme; her character as the self-abnegating, resigned protagonists, is utterly forgettable.

With a script from Alex Garland, a staple of British sci-fi (28 Days Later, Sunshine) and directed by Mark Romanek, the film is a little too unassuming.  If indeed it did want to focus more on the relationships of such a story, it produces nothing novel, far better has been seen, such as in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46. Give this one a pass; you’re not really missing anything special.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2010.