The goal: get rid of suffering and dissension and along with them, any shade of diverse thinking. First, trash emotion–have everyone pop pills everyday to suppress it. Leave out books, animals, and any changes in the weather while we’re at it. Now eliminate color. Yes, color.
Such is the world of The Giver, the new film based on the 20-year-old enormously popular Lois Lowry young reader novel. It’s a classless (and apparently race-free) society where everyone is so robotically numb that no one seems to notice the presence of the establishment’s shackles on their every thought and emotion. Jonas (a bland Brenton Thwaites) is chosen as the one young person who will get lessons in the old ways of the world, as The Receiver of Memory if you will. (Strangely, he’s not even a teenager yet in the book, yet here he’s of college age).
Jonas, to his own surprise, is chosen as the one lucky person who will have the wizened The Giver (Jeff Bridges) as a mentor who will convey to him humanity’s old, abandoned ways….Before you start thinking, “Hey who,wouldn’t want Jeff Bridges as a teacher?” the film quickly warns that the last young person (a brief Taylor Swift cameo) who ventured into a tutorial with The Giver ended up going through some horrible experience. And just in case you’re feeling skeptical about all this foreboding, Meryl Streep is around as The Chief Elder, a high lord of some sort who goes through the film materializing holographically to repeatedly warn The Giver not to go too far. The Giver seems to have an immunity from receiving any real discipline from The Chief Elder, though. At least at first.
Before I get into just how badly this world of uber-conformity sucks, I can’t help but point out that the esteemed Bridges (coming off a starring role in the bomb R.I.P.D) seems out of sorts here. Maybe it’s the “accent” he curiously adopts for the film–a speech peculiarity that seems like either someone in desperate need of major dental bridge work or a far more pedestrian suffering from a mouthful of marbles. Streep is no less annoying. The woman who can usually do no wrong merely goes through the motions here. She seems as bored by this well-meaning but vacuous film as the rest of us.
Now imagine a world where emotions like love are never expressed, where people seem to all do the same things, where curfews exist, and sex, pejoratively referred to as “stirrings,” apparently rarely rears its head. (The screenplay never addresses it but the assumption is soon made that offspring are cloned in this “perfect” world). War and hunger have been eliminated but little of any worth remains. Everyone smiles, nonetheless, which seems extra strange since there’s no fun going on.
Essentially it’s a phony world but what especially stings here is the film itself does such an utterly
lousy job making this society believable. A world that discards its elders into a fuzzy “Elsewhere” ought to be bad enough to wake up a rebellious streak in Jonas once he stop taking his pills. However, not until until Jonas’ dad (Peter Skarsgard) is exposed doing an even bigger nasty, does Jonas feel compelled to act. By this time, he’s been given a magical gift from The Giver to actually be able to feel the very things missing in his world: love and joy but also war and racism. Unlike the novel, which conjured up micro portions of these forbidden experiences, screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide decide to go macro. By the time Jonas is done with his experiment, he’s been to both the Tiananmen Square rebellion and under fire on the frontlines in a Vietnam.
Director Phillip Noyce’s The Giver, rife with undeveloped potential, sputters toward a climax and an ending that are both as laughable as they are gratuitous. They involve a baby and a sled and wads of misguided hooey. In case it’s all a bit much, comedic irony is aptly provided in the character of Jonas’ mom. Even more robotic than the rest of them, it’s none other than Katie Holmes. One can only wonder, given all the practice she received bearing the brunt of Tom Cruise’s Scientology claptrap, if this role wasn’t a lot easier to grasp.