According to Stephen King, the first contact he ever had with Stanley Kubrick came shortly before the director filmed his adaptation of King’s novel The Shining. (Which, by the by, gives me a great excuse to link to this fake trailer, much-circulated but still hugely amusing, imagining that bright-lit horror as a cockle-warmer à la Regarding Henry or A Good Year or Dan in Real Life.) King tells the story of how Kubrick called out of the blue one morning to posit the theory that all works of the supernatural must be inherently hopeful because they propose that there is life after death.
This thought occurred to me a few weeks ago while I was watching Biutiful, which is approximately 99 per cent grim, with a crucial 1 per cent of hope provided by the knowledge that all the suffering endured by the characters will be followed by serenity — at least if there’s any truth in the brief glimpse the film gives us of the afterlife. The spirit may begin its journey clinging to the ceiling, like something nasty you get in your hotel room on a cheap package holiday to Gran Canaria, but at least one dead character ends his days in a peaceful, snow-covered woodland clearing, which stands in stark contrast to the rest of the film’s locations: sweatshops, funeral parlours, immigrant detention centres and cramped urban apartments at which even a battery hen would turn up its beak.
Another, more transparently reassuring film about the afterlife — Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter (the placatory spiritual content of which is discussed here) — also opened last week. Put aside the latter picture’s shameless piggybacking on disasters natural (the 2004 tsunami) and man-made (the London bombings on 7 July 2005) and it’s clear that Hereafter is providing a necessary and traditional service. On one hand such movies offer the same balm in troubled times as a great work such as A Matter of Life and Death, which in 1946 reassured audiences grieving over wartime losses that an afterlife resembling their mortal existence, right down to the meddlesome bureaucracy, awaited them at the top of a vast staircase. But there is always the question of tone: while Powell and Pressburger’s film brings a warm, wry wit to bear on its fantasy, and leaves ample space for the viewer’s good-natured incredulity, Hereafter depends for its success on being watched straight; in that context, it leaves you feeling you’ve been taken for a sucker.
At the other end of the scale on the subject of spirituality and the afterlife is the forthcoming adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which opens on 11 February. Look out for it: despite the shocking snub it received from Bafta, and the fact that its distributor is effectively throwing in the towel by releasing it on the same day as the Coen brothers’ True Grit, with which it will compete for the same audience, it has much to recommend it. Certain details from Ishiguro’s novel have been compromised: the main character, for example, has been weirdly stripped of her sexual promiscuity in the apparent interests of good taste, while a key moment pertaining to the title has been completely undermined.
But what remains undiminished is the source material’s staggeringly sane perspective in the face of death. The film’s director Mark Romanek has already explored death and its attendant taboos from unusual angles — first in his whimsical 1985 debut Static (a highly original work which, outrageously, he now omits from his CV) and then in the mighty video he directed for “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. Without lessening the cosmic dread around the subject, Never Let Me Go brings to it a sense of resolution, even positivity.
Some reviews of the novel were understandably circumspect in discussing the story’s surprises, which were revealed only gradually, but I can say upfront — because the film does — that it begins at a boarding school for children who have been cloned to provide organ donations when they reach adulthood. As the characters grow up, their struggle to come to terms with their premature deaths (well, premature to us, but natural to them) mirrors the futile wrestling match with mortality in which we all engage.
“I think we’re offering a fairly optimistic story,” Ishiguro told me last year.
“How the characters behave to each other provides an optimistic view of human nature. They’re not all fighting for their little bit, they’re not grasping at material possessions; what they really care about is each other, and if they’ve done something wrong they want to apologise and put it right. That’s why the bleak backdrop is there. It’s so we can watch what matters to people when they know they’re down to their last few moments. There’s a big metaphor about mortality, the human lifespan, in the book but for me the point of the story isn’t to say, ‘Look folks, we’re all going to die, just wanted to remind you!’ It’s not that. It’s more that given we only have limited time, how should we use it? What’s actually important? What are human beings like?”
Never Let Me Go is released on 11 February.
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