Game Is Rigged

I have a feeling (and no more than that) that I’m not going to be all that wild about seeing Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go a second time. Because, as the Wiki page for Kazuo Ishiguro‘s book makes clear, once the layers have been peeled back and the situation is laid bare, it becomes a piece, essentially, about resignation and doom.

Not so, says a friend who’s seen it. There’s more to it than what has been summarized in this or that forum. It’s not some kind of “aha!” giveaway that comes at the end of the third act.

“If the film is difficult for some people, it’s not because of the movie’s quality, but simply because it deals with issues that most people are uncomfortable with,” he says. “The performances are all fine. And the direction is subtle. It has a modesty. It’s all handled with humanity. The point isn’t to wallow in their tragedy, but to relate their experiences to our own. If you understand that, the film slowly builds its power as it progresses.”

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31 thoughts on “Game Is Rigged”

  1. I’m a glutton for wallowing in depressing truths and impending certain doom, so I’m pretty psyched for this…

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  3. “it becomes a piece, essentially, about resignation and doom.”

    And you don’t see any truth in that? You really discount a work because it’s theme isn’t entirely uplifting?

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  4. No, I don’t see any “truth” in resignation and doom. Or not the sort of truth I’d care to recognize, thank you. You say it’s not “entirely uplifting.” I can do without uplift. What this seems to be, no offense, is entirely glum.

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  5. Getting it mixed up with Let Me In. Not really good marketing to release it so close to each other, especially when those films both have child actors.

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  7. I really hope they edit that scene of Garfield screaming like a spacker in the street. He’s a good actor; not sure why they’d highlight that ludicrous scene. Looks like the kid was tired from 15 takes of wailing and let his full retard out.

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  8. someone needs to put that wailing on a loop with Harrison Ford yelling “I already work around the clock!” at him and then this film year will be completely summarized.

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  9. By all means, let’s ignore a film with Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Michelle Williams (3 Oscar nominated actresses, by the way) because its plot focuses on the themes of “resignation” and “doom”. It’s not like great writers throughout the centuries (Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Hemingway, et al.) have ever deemed it worthy to incorporate them into their own literature.

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  11. If you haven’t read the book, no big deal. But writing something like “as the Wiki page for Kazuo Ishiguro’s book makes clear…” is silly. The themes, structure, the development of the story or characters isn’t something that’s “made clear” by a wiki page. Jumping from the fact that a character resigns themselves to something on the last line of an online summary to assuming that the story’s entire premise and theme is about resignation is, well, to repeat myself, silly (silly is being polite).

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  12. I really enjoyed the book but suspect the movie will be a bit on the dry side. In a perfect world The Island and this could just be combined into a perfect movie.

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  13. As far as I’m concerned, resignation to (or, to use a less negative connotation, acceptance of) one’s ultimate fate is one of the more rewarding and true experiences any human can experience. The clarity that comes from recognizing where one is heading can allow one to prioritize and make the most of one’s most brutally limited resource…

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  14. “Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Michelle Williams”

    Michelle Williams is in this? Are you sure? I didn’t see her anywhere.

    Sally Hawkins nearly got some role in a big blockbuster around a decade ago and I can’t remember what it was now. It’s weird to think that execs were thinking of making her a star. She’s fairly unconvential looking.

    Shit, it was Titanic, I think. She nearly got the Winslet role. Bizarre.

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  15. Huh. There’s an element of resignation to the book, but it’s a sort of melancholy “live life” resignation. I mean, everybody dies, and everybody knows they’re going to die; this book just sort of makes that sad realization more manifest and apparent. I don’t recall the book being particularly depressing, just tragic. Like life, you know?

    Anyway, knowing this director and the subject matter, I bet this will be powerful stuff. “One Hour Photo” is massively underrated, and draws similar pathos from an ugly situation.

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  16. Wells to The Perils of Thinking: “The clarity that comes from recognizing where one is heading,” you say, “can allow one to prioritize and make the most of one’s most brutally limited resource.”

    Yes, clarity of mind, as in, to take the most immediate and pressing manifestation of this awareness, “the clarity of mind that comes to a man standing on the gallows is wonderful.” As in face facts, sharpen your mind and prioritize.

    I’ve always been one, however, to take it a step further and not just prioritize and all that, but to first and foremost revel and rejoice in the immediacy of the big symphony. Death is something to be accepted, yes, but primarily fought and strategized against, frequently laughed at, lampooned and pooh-poohed, acknowledged but simultaneously “ignored” (in a manner of speaking), dismissed, despised and raged against (in Dylan Thomas‘s words) right to the end.

    There is only life, only the continuance, only the fuel and the fire…only the next step, the next breath, the next meal, the next sip of water, the next hill to climb, the next perfect pair of courdoruy pants, the next adventure, the next hypnotizing woman, the next sip or splash of water in your face, the next staircase to run down two or three steps at a time, the next rental car and the next winding road to concentrate on and carefully negotiate, etc.

    Knowing your time on earth is limited and that the clock is pressing down leads one to value the time left and to treat each day as if it’s your last…agreed.

    But you also say “as far as I’m concerned, resignation to (or, to use a less negative connotation, acceptance of) one’s ultimate fate is one of the more rewarding and true experiences any human can experience.”

    Resignation and acceptance? I know what you mean but somehow those terms sound more like what a person with terminal cancer has to come to terms with than a person living a robust life.

    The basic premise of Ernest Becker‘s “The Denial of Death” (1973) is, to go by one summary, “that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.

    “Becker argues that …man is able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving his symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an “immortality project” (or causa sui), in which he creates or becomes part of something which he feels will last forever, man feels he has “become” heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die, compared to his physical body that will die one day.

    “This, in turn, gives man the feeling that his life has meaning; a purpose; significance in the grand scheme of things.”

    All to say that from one what I can gather, not having read the book but having read a couple of reviews and a couple of summaries, is that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of dynamic go-for-it spiritual activity along these general lines in Never Let Me Go. Nobody seems to protest, creatively deny, fight against, counter-attack, escape from or anything like that. The young people in the book have been created to donate, and donate they do, and then they die. Terrific.

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  17. Since we’re talking about it, it’s pretty unclear in the book how aware the young people are of their fate. The adults, however, are keenly aware of the moral pitfalls of the scenario, which adds a lot of emotion. Much of the book is essentially the quest of the young people to answer all the big questions – why are we here, who made us, are you my mother?, etc – from a novel perspective. In the book, at least, it’s nowhere near a fait accompli what’s happening, and when the young people do realize what’s happening, the book takes a turn.

    In other words, think more along the lines of, say, the tragedy of the Replicants in “Blade Runner,” suddenly realizing their days are numbered.

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  18. Ummm….as well-written as the book may be, maybe even brilliantly so, am I just confused, or is the plot of the story not as a big a mountain of bullshit as it appears? I am only going off the Wiki link from above, but really, THIS is the premise of the story?

    Wouldn’t society have to devolve to an IQ level somewhere below that of the one in “Idiocracy” to even come close to considering such a barbaric and soulless practice like this? What year in the future is this supposed to be set in? Or did the author put it in an alternate universe where common sense doesn’t exist at all?

    There has to be more to this because I don’t believe an inch of this thing, and I’m somebody who buys Michael Cera as an action hero. My standards obviously aren’t sky high here.

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  19. That said, I should stress that a lot of the power of the novel comes from you, the reader, gradually and then finally understanding what’s going on just as the young people do. If they tip the hand too early in the film your qualms may have weight. Right now you’re sort of complaining about the twist before the fact, having researched and discovered how it ends. Not really fair to the story.

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  20. Hallick, it’s science fiction. I (and you) can lame dozens of sci-fi scenarios featuring equally morally dubious or far more ludicrous situations. Again: see “Blade Runner,” above. If anything, this story’s idea is a little less out of the realm of possibility, albeit perhaps not to this extreme. We already donate organs and harvest body parts from genetically modified animals. We already clone creatures. Cloning humans is one of the last remaining true moral quagmires. It seems inevitable it will happen. The question after that is: then what?

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  22. Well, in Blade Runner the exploited weren’t human, and the idea that they were just high functioning androids is enough to justify the idea that humans could hold them apart and not see them as individuals with their own right to live as they choose. But in this story, the people are cloned humans, not something you can see being rationalized as machines or sub-human animals, so I don’t understand how the alternate historical timeline would explain how people could raise them for organ harvesting and nothing else.

    I don’t buy the basic premise at all. Not this well-established and apparently unchallenged.

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