Giver takes well-trodden path
FILM
The Giver (M)
Jeff Bridges, Brenton Thwaites. Meryl Streep
3 STARS
DIRECTOR Phillip Noyce
REVIEW Pier Leach
Teen literature fans will have been waiting patiently for an adaptation of The Giver, a dystopian futuristic thriller based on Lois Lowry's slim, bestselling 1993 novel that preceded both Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth's Divergent series.
Unfortunately the latter two got to the big screen first, along with a raft of others, making it far more difficult to impress. It's a saturated market. And it is looking ahead to The Maze Runner (opening this week) and the penultimate The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.
So Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart, The Big Lebowski), who optioned the film in 1995, may have missed the boat in terms of fresh themes on the big screen; the start of The Giver plays out with eerie similarity to Divergent.
But under the direction of Australian Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence, Salt) it is still a worthwhile addition to the genre.
The action takes place in a futuristic society that's ostensibly utopian, one that has rid itself of poverty, hunger, violence and even sadness in favour of uniformity, sameness and a drug-controlled evenness of mood - a kind of Stepford Wives scenario.
When its young people turn 18 they are divided up into the limited professions that best suit their characters, which have been monitored closely since birth in their non-filial, assigned family units.
Jonas, played by 25-year-old Australian actor Brenton Thwaites (Maleficent), is identified as one of the very few who can "see beyond".
To the mild concern of his "parents" (Alexander Skarsgard and Katie Holmes), Jonah is assigned a special and rare role, the Receiver, or keeper of memories, under the tutelage of the wise character of the title (Bridges). Watching closely is the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep), a scary dictator-matriarch type who is convinced that "when people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong".
Noyce sticks closely to Lowry's rather heavy-handed metaphor for bland uniformity in the film's beginning by shooting everything in dull monochrome. Jonas, with his uncommon sensory gift, soon experiences glimpses of muted red and, with The Giver's help, the whole film is transformed gradually into full, saturated colour.
In montage sequences intended as lightning bolts of all the sensory experiences the free world to has to offer — sunsets, weddings, dancing, raindrops, the crashing ocean, newborn babies — Jonas is given memories and realises society is being robbed.
Noyce doesn't handle the idea with quite the same impressionistic finesse as a director such as Terrance Malick in Tree of Life, for example; it is far more music video-like. But it is a striking idea, nevertheless.
Screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide only deviate significantly from Lowry's source material by making its characters older, and in the film's ending, which takes up where the book left off to round the story out.
There are some fine, if familiar, ideas in The Giver, a solid film that is bolstered by convincing performances. It might not add a great deal to the popular genre, but given the freedom to choose, seeing The Giver would certainly not be choosing wrong. Now screening.
