The futuristic world imagined by author Lois Lowry in The Giver is a tranquil, safe, and subtly terrifying nightmare. From the ashes of “The Ruin” during which the planet was torn apart by war and climate problems, the communities were built. Distinctions based upon class have been eliminated as has color (both racially and visually) and the sensation of pain.
Democracy and open inquiry are unheard of: the entire social universe their residents inhabit is mapped out, monitored, and controlled by the Elders in charge. There’s assigned clothing to wear and curfew orders to obey. Families are arranged, not formed naturally by romantic partners. Every morning medication is doled out to keep the people sedated and amenable to the numerous dictates. Taking it is, of course, very much mandatory. It’s a place without any music, sex, love, or even dreams. Expressing your thoughts in terms deemed too strong invariably brings the admonishment, “Precision of language!”
For the many who have read the book, certain images and expectations are there that you just can’t dispense with entirely. This adaptation by Australian director Phillip Noyce finds plenty of ways to confound. It gets at least the most basic plot fundamentals more or less right. A teenaged boy in the community named Jonas (he’s played by Brenton Thwaites) is about to graduate from school with his life-long close friends, Asher and Fiona. They have no idea what awaits them. Their futures are announced at a large public ceremony where based on their personalty traits and skills they learn whether they’ll be a drone pilot or a caretaker or maybe a geneticist, among possible fields. After each The Chief Elder (a menacingly officious and omnipresent Meryl Streep) thanks them politely for the gift of their childhoods. Jonas’s outcome is saved purposefully for the last, due to its unique and challenging nature.
He will be an apprentice of sorts to one of of the elders, “The Giver” (he’s played by Jeff Bridges, who also served as one of the producers) from whom he will receive the memories passed down for generations and kept secret from everyone else. It’s a job that entails very real pain. Grasping his wrists to share powerful, vivid memories, the Giver shows him things far beyond his understanding: he learns of snow and suffering, religions and holidays in homes comprised of actual families. And when he can’t share all of this newfound knowledge with others or ignore what it unleashes in him, he hatches a plan to escape to the world beyond the forbidden boundary, freeing the memories for all.
As Jonas gets further into his instruction with the Giver (they meet in his home on the edge of the community, the most rustic dwelling by far with a distractingly majestic view of the clouds), he sees the world in increasingly more color. And The Giver, shot in a rather blank and boring gray-toned black and white follows suit by letting maroon reds and earth-color greens seep in. At the same time the movie ineptly makes the transition from a drama to a full out paranoid sci-fi thriller.
The first half of the movie is merely by-the-numbers and unspectacular filmmaking (with fussily pretentious clips of life around the world before The Ruin inserted somewhere in the middle). There’s very little wit or insight but there’s nothing horribly wrong either. But the second, more ominous half strives for urgency and thrills and turns clunky and embarrassing instead, with Noyce’s direction hollowing out. It’s also where the movie diverges even more brazenly with the source material.
In the novel, Jonas is supposed to be about twelve years old. Here, played by the kind-faced and likable but not particularly interesting Thwaites, he’s too old (the actor was 24 at the time of shooting, and the character is supposed to be high school senior age) and even with his white beard and oddly muddled voice, gruff voice Bridges is too young. Screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weed have traded in what the book is about-the plucky precocious actions of a preteen-for the more conventional bravery of a young man with active hormones. You don’t have to be some literary purist to decry the way that with this brittle pretty-boy big screen rendition they’ve trampled on something sacred.
This is a bad adaptation in many ways because it’s unfathomable that it ever could have been an effective and coherent one. Like The Lovely Bones, the brilliant and wrenching novel by Alice Sebold that director Peter Jackson made into such an unmitigated disaster, this is material that should have been left alone. There are ideas and images in the book that are categorically impossible to replicate in a live-action setting. The depiction of the community and the colorless utopian life is uninspiring because they’ve made rather uninteresting choices that have to compete with the far richer, more imaginative ones that Lowry’s writing evoked.
Decisions like jamming in a contrived quasi-romantic subplot with the Fiona character, which gives it the feel of a generic teen love story, add unsurprisingly nothing and the backstory about the girl who preceded Jonas but tragically couldn’t handle the searing intensity of it is unnecessary too (she’s played in a ghost-memory by Taylor Swift). Even the ending-stunning and indelible in the book because of its ambiguity-feels more spelled out and resolved here. The Giver is automatic for the masses nearly every step of the way. It takes the simple and lyrical text of the timeless novel and makes it something over-simplified and unmemorable. Lois Lowry’s writing and her many fans deserved far better treatment.
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