The Giver - Film Review

The Giver is a very odd movie. It features a couple of very appealing young actors in Australia’s Brenton Thwaites as Jonas and Odeya Rush as Fiona; the film’s leads. It has the presence of Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep in key supporting roles. It even has a small role for singer Taylor Swift designed, no doubt, to appeal to the young adults who buy her music. The film is directed by Phillip Noyce, another Australian with a wealth of film-making experience dating back to the 1970s, who has directed some great action thriller movies. It’s based on the controversial but very successful book of the same name, written by author Lois Lowry. Yet, The Giver lacks focus and feels too much like a series of scenes tied together by quick-cuts of home movies that serve to fill the space in places where it should be creating its own dramatic moments but, instead, relies on stock footage to convey the emotion it wants it characters and its audience to feel.

The challenge of adapting The Giver into a movie is highlighted in the visualisation of the drab, emotionless, colourless, homogenous society in which the bulk of the story takes place. As with many young adult science fiction stories, this one is set in a dystopian future where some kind of “climate event” has forced the creation of a large-scale secured community, where individuality is not allowed, the inhabitants are drugged and the government of “elders” rule by way of pseudo-martial law. The setting is a variation on the 1976 Logan’s Run movie and it would not be surprising if the owners of the Logan’s Run copyright took legal action if ever they see The Giver, the similarities are so pronounced. One of the opening scenes comes so close to plagiarising the opening Carousel sequence from Logan’s Run that it’s concerning that somebody else’s intellectual property could be so easily infringed without consequence.

The tedium of the film is reflected in the tedium of the various cultural ceremonies that are depicted, including one where the “children” – Jonas, Fiona and their friend Asher played by Cameron Monaghan – become “adults” when they are allocated their responsibility within the community. Fiona is nominated as a care-giver for the young, while Asher, in a way too on-the-nose set-up of “he’s the bad guy”, is selected to become a drone pilot. (It’s a pretty ham-fisted piece of analogy that criticises America’s use of the type of technology in the real world.) Jonas, however, misses out and is left standing on his own after his other 149 classmates have all received their job allocations. Meryl Streep, sleep-walking her way through the role of Chief Elder, announces that Jonas will become the Receiver; the most important role in the community. Watching on is Jeff Bridges as the current Receiver, who will instruct Jonas and transfer the knowledge of the outside world and past history to him.

It’s all very cliché and by-the-numbers film making. Moments where obvious tension should exist, there’s none. Scenes where the viewer should care whether or not Jonas will succeed in becoming the next Receiver fall flat and fizzle to nothing. Perhaps the bland setting of the film itself somehow infected the production with an inertia that made it difficult for any of them to energise their performances to a point that makes the film’s 100 minute running time of any real interest to the viewer. Jeff Bridges gives yet another gruff performance that has become his stock and trade in recent years and, in this role, has a serious case of the ‘Marlon Brando Mumbles’. To make matters worse, screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert Weide introduce a sub-plot for Bridge’s character that is so poorly executed that it only serves to confuse the already-struggling narrative drive of the film. The manner in which the film has been edited together leaves a very definite suspicion that important story material was left out; much of which was exposition to help the audience understand how Thwaites and Bridges’ characters are able to communicate the way they do and to provide a more detailed account of the meaning behind the film’s ending.

The Giver also commits the movie-making crime of not providing the audience with a clear-cut resolution to the story it’s trying to tell. Admittedly, this is a carry-over from Lois Lowry’s novel and if Christopher Nolan had made The Giver perhaps the ambiguity of the ending may have been more meaningful because of what had preceded it. Phillip Noyce is no Christopher Nolan and The Giver is not Inception. Those familiar with Lowry’s other books already know the fate of Jonas, but the way in which the film presents its ending feels like a cheat because it leaves the impression that The Giver’s producers are trying to create a franchise for future adventures. The problem with this approach is that it takes the audience who have paid good money to see a self-contained movie with a self-contained story for granted. More and more movie makers are trying to achieve “franchise” success with their movies but it creates schizophrenic story-telling because the plot gets hi-jacked by story points that are not related to the film’s narrative. The Giver is an example of this, although not quite on the same scale as The Amazing Spiderman 2.

The Giver is an underwhelming addition to the growing sub-genre of young adult dystopian science fiction and, unfortunately, has been released at a time when more superior versions of this type of film have either just been released or will soon be released -The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One.