Never Let Me Go

Written by Jonathan Jacobs

Kathy (Casey Mulligan from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), Tommy (the new Spiderman Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley from Pirates of the Caribbean and The Jacket) are growing up together at a quaint and far-removed private school. They are never allowed to act promiscuous or devious in any way. It seems the school masters maintain an allegorical force field around their institution. Rumors and myths are disseminated to prevent students from feeling curious about their surroundings. Students are also prohibited from smoking cigarrettes and they are allowed very few possessions from the outside world. Though boring to action film die-hards, Never Let Me go is a masterful story of dystopian fiction. The suspense builds and our wonder heightens until a concerned and courageous teacher reveals the horrible truth to our impressionable teens. After their 21st birthday they will all begin a series of "donations". Their organs will be taken from them as they die a slow and methodical death until their life force is extinguished. There are no reprieves and life will show them no mercy.

     After the horror of this earth-shattering revelation sinks in, Ruth makes a life-altering decision. Well-knowing Kathy and Tommy are on their way to becoming adolescent lovers and soul mates she intervenes and seduces the impressionable and confused Tommy. She does this both to prevent herself from being alone and out of jealousy, fully realizing their lives would be brutally short. Kathy simply wants to enjoy life before it will be unmercifully extinguished. Lugubriously, it turns out their school would be the last of its kind. Apparently its purpose was to find out if the genetically cloned students embodied a "soul" in the spiritual and religious senses. If they had an identity and a sense of individuality advocates could defend against their wholesale slaughter. If the students demonstrated uniquely human talents perhaps their defenders would have ammunition with which to present their cases to the world. Unfortunately their school would eventually succumb to the pressures exerted by of the living and close its doors. Once graduated, Tommy, Ruth and Kathy are transported to the "Cottages" in bucolic England to await the time when they will fulfill their life's purpose.

     As the film moves along the horror of the fate of our three innocent protagonists hits viewers squarely in the jaw. We desperately want this picture to be about their escape and to witness the clones fighting back. Regrettably we find they have nowhere to hide and nowhere to go. They are tagged and monitored at all times and technology though ostensibly primitive is also perfectly preventative. Meanwhile, at the cottages, Ruth flaunts her sexual relationship with Tommy to distract Kathy from her feelings that she has and will always carry for her true love. Regardless of this puerile taunting, Kathy makes a mature decision and ends her emotional pain. When life is so short why suffer the indignity of jealousy and betrayal? She becomes a "Carer" or a floating nurse/caretaker for the donors. This is a voluntary position that delays one’s inevitable donations but only for a short while.

     Years later, far removed from the cottages and the melodrama of their love triangle, a healthy Kathy meets Ruth and Tommy after their second donations. Both are in morbid spirits and only Tommy maintains a semblance of health. We are privy to their scars, their dripping blood on the operating table and the macabresque surgeries they have undergone. Finally, nearing the end of her life, Ruth admits her guilt and pettiness to Kathy and insists she reunite with Tommy to petition for a stay of execution on account of having found true love that can be clearly and cogently proven. In the midst of so much tragedy and the specter of death, their willingness to survive is a testament to the human spirit no matter how life is created. The meaning of life is elegantly called into question when set against a premise of certain death. In a tragic scene the three childhood friends reminisce about their lives at school while sitting inside of a beached boat stuck in the sand of a desolate beach. This is a picturesque metaphor for the human condition if ever there was one.

     Never Let Me Go presents a sickening and morbid spectacle of how far people with money and power will go to survive. The premise is conceivable and is portrayed with bitter reality. In the absence of escape, and with suicide seeming a waste due to the inevitability of death, why educate and foster the clones' minds at all? Why put their poor souls through such agony and torture? Their organ donations are handled so gruesomely and efficaciously it makes my stomach turn. Even so, this is a concept that needs to be addressed. It is also part of the much larger debate about stem cell research and embryonic cells. Mulligan, Knightley and Garfield may not be my cup of Earl Gray but they do a fantastic job of portraying these three tortured souls and they will convince audiences that holding out hope when there is none is terrifying, heart-wrenching and represents the truth of the human condition in all of its spirit to survive (see Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist work Nausea for a similar conceptual example). Two spinning thumbs up.