The current wave of popular YA novels set in a horribly dystopian society of the near future, such as the Hunger Games and Divergent series, all owe a debt to Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a 1993 Newberry Medal-winning book that’s still a staple of middle school reading lists today. Two decades later, and only after the more recent dystopian books have been turned into major motion pictures, The Giver also makes its way to the screen and, from the standpoint of thought provoking ideas, at least, it’s a definite improvement on the other, considerably less subtle movies.
The Giver is set in an unspecified time following an unspecified calamity that has wreaked havoc on the earth. What’s left of civilization lives in the Community, a perfectly organized and beautifully maintained village on the top of a high mesa overlooking a barren wasteland (the movie was filmed in South Africa). The society lives by some basic conformist rules: lying is forbidden; “precision of language” is required; apologies are readily given and invariably accepted for any imagined offense. Residents also receive daily injections of some form of tranquilizers to help keep them in a mildly amiable, somewhat sedated mood. At age 18, each person is given a carefully selected job assigned to him or her by the ruling Council of Elders, headed by Meryl Streep. As they enter productive society, a similar group of older individuals willingly go off to Elsewhere. The entire proceedings are part of a well orchestrated ceremony, attended by the entire Community and marked by occasional rounds of very polite, very restrained clapping.
This year’s ceremony marks the coming of age of Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), his best male friend, Asher (Cameron Monaghan), and his best female friend, Fiona (Odeya Rush). However, while Asher and Fiona are given conventional occupations carefully selected by the film makers so as to figure into later plot developments, Jonas learns that he is a very special person, selected to be the new Receiver. It seems that only one person in the Community, the Giver (Jeff Bridges), has any memories of the past. The Giver serves as an advisor to the Council based on his knowledge of previous events and will pass that that knowledge to the next generation, namely Jonas.
However, when Jonas starts to receive memories of the past from the Giver, he doesn’t just learn the dates of historic events; he also experiences genuine emotions, both good and bad, for the first time in his life. Jonas soon realizes that the carefully constructed life that everyone leads in the Community, the idea of which is to avoid hatred and strife, is a pale version of what people experienced in the past. Worse, the Council has institutionalized the murders of both the old (going to Elsewhere) and the very young (babies that aren’t considered strong enough are “released”), to keep their version of a perfect society going. When Jonas realizes that his new baby brother is about to be released because his emotions can’t be controlled and he won’t stop crying, Jonas decides to take baby Gabriel and head for the world outside that he has experienced through the Giver.
Jeff Bridges produced The Giver and reportedly spent over 20 years trying to get it filmed (originally, his father Lloyd was to play the Giver), so he obviously cares deeply about the project. It’s also clear that he and director Phillip Noyce have been influenced in their portrayal of a future society by the movies they saw in their younger years. The Giver borrows from Soylent Green, Fahrenheit 451, and Logan’s Run, among others. The first part of the movie is filmed in black and white, until Jonas first experiences emotions and sees a dazzling full color montage of all sorts of happiness and celebration, a vision that’s a near duplicate of what’s shown to Edward G. Robinson at the end of Soylent Green (and Robinson’s fate is strikingly similar to what viewers know will happen in Elsewhere).
Noyce’s clever use of color is just one of the many fine touches, including some excellent production design and solid performances from Bridges and Streep, that help make the first two-thirds of The Giver enjoyable, if a bit simplistic for adult audiences. Still, the movie’s script makes some good points, such as the Community’s insistence on precision of language being an excuse to substitute euphemism for emotion (even the word “love” can’t be used because supposedly it’s the least precise word of all).
The Giver’s script deviates from the book somewhat to make the film more appealing to the high school crowd. For one thing, Jonas and his friends have been aged from 12 to 18 for the movie, and, in addition, there’s a fair amount of conventional action in the film. As a result, Jonas sneaks into the “nurturing center” to take baby Gabriel (aided by Fiona, who conveniently happens to work there), makes a daring escape over the side of the mesa on motorcycle, is pursued by drones (but eludes them because Asher conveniently happens to be in charge of finding him) and then makes his way down whitewater rapids. Jonas is involved literally in a race against time, since if he gets to a specific rock formation, he will trigger some type of circuit breaker that will automatically restore everyone’s memories and, presumably, stop Fiona from being released.
Unfortunately, the action in the last half hour of The Giver isn’t particularly well done and requires viewers to completely suspend their sense of reality. To escape the Community, Jonas has to ride his motorcycle over a 100-foot-tall mesa while holding onto Gabriel, but he lands without doing any real damage to himself, Gabriel, or the bike. He’s also able to make his way mostly on foot from the South African desert to a snow covered mountainside with no food and only one small bottle of milk for Gabriel. A book could gloss over such impossibilities by being vague in its descriptions, but it’s much harder for viewers to ignore the blatant disregard for the laws of physics.
In the end, I fear that The Giver will soon be destined for cinematic obscurity because it never really decides what type of movie it wants to be. It’s based on a film for niddle schoolers, but the characters and their burgeoning, albeit fairly innocent, desires are intended to appeal more to a slightly older audience. That audience, in turn, will find the movie a bit too innocent and restrained and lacking sufficient CGI-enhanced action. Finally, adults will probably find the morality a bit somewhat too simplistic and the resolution too pat. The Giver is a movie that sort of goes in a number of different directions and is only sort of good as a result.
