THE GIVER (Phillip Noyce 2014)

[Chris Knipp]

Phillip Noyce: The Giver (2013)


Odeya Rush and Brenton Thwaites in The Giver

Running away to memories

Australian director Phillip Noyce has directed his own adaptation of a well-known young adult tale about a dystopian future society starring young Australian actor Brenton Thwaites as Jonas, a boy chosen to play a key role. Those who have read Lois Lowry’s novel inform us that, not too surprisingly, its grim, uncertain ending has been replaced by a hopeful one for the screen, and Jonas, who originally was eleven, is now a handsome eighteen-year-old teenage girls can swoon over. Thwaites is a young-looking 25, and puts on an American accent to match those of the other actors, including Alexander Skarsgård (Father), Katie Holmes (Mother), and Jeff Bridges as the society's keeper of memories, whom Jonas is selected to replace. It was Bridges who sought for eighteen years to get somebody to make this movie. HIs father Lloyd was to play the old codger he's now old enough to impersonate. And Meryl Streep was hired for the role of the chilly, omnipresent Chief Elder whom Lars von Trier might have called The Boss of It All.

The society these people live in is one that's drained of all feeling and life in the interests of peace and continuity. People see everything in black and white -- the source of the film's mostly very generic look. That is, till Jonas, along with his generation, is assigned a function by the Chief Elder. While his best friends Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) are designated as a nurturer and a drone pilot, Jonas is chosen to be Receiver of Memory. This means he spends time with his gnarly predecessor (Jeff Bridges) in an book-lined mausoleum, where the society's memories of what life was once like, when the world was full of color, action, sex, art, conflict -- all that make life terrible and wonderful -- are kept on file. Presumably they're preserved just in case they might be needed. But really, this is a story device. Bridges' character's telepathic transfer of scenes from real life have one real purpose: to make Jonas discontented with the colorless, static existence his people are forced to live now and eager to break out.

In the film's simplified version of the story, you have to take a lot on faith and go by what the atmosphere implies. The system, it turns out, while there is a pretense of goody-goody peace and kindness, actually includes carefully concealed practices of systematic murder en masse of both babies and older people. Flimsy euphemisms like being sent "elsewhere" are used to cover these horrors. But with the heightened awareness he acquires through the exciting "memories" received from Bridges' character and through secretly discontinuing the daily injections everybody gets to make them docile, Jonas becomes aware of the society's cruelty and hypocrisy. The far-fetched conceit of the story is that if he can escape far enough outside the geographical limits of their world, he can make collective memories come back for everyone and reboot the whole society. The point is, he's in for a wilderness adventure (carrying a sibling baby who has been scheduled for extinction) and escape from the Orwellian confines he was born into.

The story doesn't explain how this society can be so ultra-hitech, when nobody seems to really know anything. But hey, this is young adult science fiction. Or at least that YA material as somewhat clumsily recycled by writers Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide. This stuff reportedly is used in American middle schools (once called "junior high") with talking points and such. And it could indeed serve to prod young minds into the kind of understanding of totalitarianism more thoroughly and grimly delivered by Orwell's 1984. (The absence of books recalls Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, memorably filmed by François Truffaut.) Though some say Lois Lowry’s book is better than them (and it was actually published earlier), this material as treated here is much like those other Hollywood-converted teen dystopias, the Hunger Games series and Divergent -- except this feels quickly slung together and with a lesser budget. The uninteresting sets and costumes and sloppy editing used for the sentimental commercial-like "memories" in color seem more like a Sixties TV program than an up-to-date film. Luckily, in his bland, bright-eyed way, Brenton Thwaites is swoon-worthy; and Jeff Bridges is mysterious and mellow. But the others make no impression and Meryl Streep's bossy Big Sister type feels distinctly phoned-in. We must wait for young adults to tell us if for them this movie is a satisfying evocation of their memorable reading experience or a disappointing travesty. But for the independent viewer, while not horrible by any means, it's just slow and not terribly interesting. The Hunger Games may be schlock, but it's schlock on a memorably grand and glorious scale. Having been capable of such excitements as Patriot Games and Salt and thoughtful stuff like The Quiet American and Rabbit Proof Fence, Phillip Noyce might have done a better job on this.

The Giver, 94 mins., premiered in NYC 11 August, and opened in the rest of the US 15 August. It comes out in other countries in subsequent months.