The Giver

The Giver is the latest sci-fi fantasy young adult novel to get the big screen, big budget treatment. The story was completely new to me, though Lois Lowry's much-loved YA book, which won the 1994 Newbery Medal, is apparently used widely in middle school English classes. Nevertheless, its narrative and themes feel like the same retreads of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and the dystopian cinema of the 1970s that are recycled by The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, Mortal Instruments, Blood Red Road, Pure, and so many other YA novel movie adaptations.  The film centers on a young man named Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) and his friends coming of age in a seemingly ideal future world where no one experiences pain, conflict, discrimination, or other societal problems (though they do somehow still have competition, excitement, fear, anger, mistrust, jealousy, humor, and dozens of other human characteristics which contradict the plausibility of this society). When Jonas turns 16, he is assigned the special honor of becoming “the receiver of memory,” which means he has daily visits with The Giver (Jeff Bridges) who shares with him all the knowledge that their society has rejected. Bridges, one of the main producers of this film, is the only actor who plays a credible character rather than a two-dimensional sketch of a person. But Bridges’ Giver is a generic wise-old-man part that we’ve seen done better dozens of times before. The rest of the actors simply play conduits for the film’s commonplace ideas about the importance of individuality, the dangers of fascistic ideology, and the irony that we can’t have love without hate.

For many years I ran the film/video department at a creative arts camp where I wrote and produced short movies with groups of 8- to 15-year-olds.  These little films often centered on mysterious, dystopian worlds because the kids creating them grew up on books like The Giver, The Hunger Games, and Holes (and I grew up on films like Planet of the Apes, THX 1138, and Blade Runner). When you are working with teens and pre-teens for three-week sessions, with only a few days to write your scripts before you start shooting, audiences are forgiving of films with faulty logic, underdeveloped characters, and major narrative holes. But when you make a full length, Hollywood blockbuster with a twenty-five million dollar budget, you simply need to raise the bar higher.  The Giver has such an inexcusably sloppy screenplay--full of plot turns and dialogue that make thematic points rather than narrative sense--I would have insisted on a major rewrite before shooting it with any of my kids. Similarly, director Phillip Noyce (Dead Calm, Patriot Games, The Quiet American) uses many of the same techniques 12-year-old filmmakers with no budget would use to tell this story: bland black and white photography to symbolize the sameness of the dystopian future, ridiculous props that look like they were pulled out of storage and repurposed, and images and video of dubious quality downloaded from the internet to represent the hero’s dreams and psychic visions of the past. This last tactic is especially —egregious and ineffective. When someone dreams about flying, that dream should not look like a YouTube video taken by a GoPro camera strapped to a skydiver’s helmet.  

As the chief elder of the dystopic world, Meryl Streep will remind many of Jodie Foster in the dreadful Neill Blomkamp film Elysium from the previous year. Streep’s role isn’t quite as blatantly embarrassing as Foster’s, but The Giver is a worse movie than the Elysium (and I thought it would be years before a sci-fi film out-sucked Blomkamp’s simpleminded shoot-em-up parable). Lowry's book may be a great read for young people, but Noyce’s film adaptation is one of the dullest, most uninspired additions to the clogged pipeline of YA sci-fi cinema yet.