Director: Phillip Noyce
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Odeya Rush
Two stars
An agreeable young-adult riff on Orwell – via Logan's Run – topped with the kind of magical-transformation baloney that passes for an ending in too many otherwise fine Hollywood adventures, Phillip Noyce's The Giver greets a man-made Utopia with an eternal question: "If you can't feel, what's the point?"
Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning source novel has been substantially altered here, mostly in ways that nudge it towards other chosen-one teen fantasies set in restrictive futuristic worlds (Divergent being one of the most recent).
The presence of Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep in supporting roles will help draw some attention from grown-ups who don't know the book, but while the film may see enough success to justify follow-ups (Lowry has written three sequels), this franchise won't come close to competing with The Hunger Games.
Brenton Thwaites plays Jonas, who lives in a world where colour, unpredictable weather and interpersonal conflict have been expunged and people aspire to perfect sameness. Memories of the unruly past have been erased, known only to a single Receiver of Memory (Bridges).
Jonas is chosen to inherit the Receiver’s role and study with his predecessor. This process of eye-opening is easily the film’s highlight, and Thwaites is appropriately awestruck by his first encounters with colour, excitement and love.
With the exception of the psychic sessions between Jonas and the Giver, everything about this scenario is grounded in the physical world. But (no spoilers here) the hurdle Jonas eventually faces is more akin to the enchanted object that a wizard-battling hero can simply smash to break a spell that is enslaving his kingdom.
This easy out should go over especially badly with readers attached to the novel’s much more ambiguous ending – though to be fair, audiences by now are so used to this type of nonsense that it hardly even registers.
