Alo Party Peoples.
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| Directed by Philip Noyce Written by Micheal Mitnick and Robert B. Weide |
Today's subject, The Giver, is based on a 1993 novel by Lois Lowry that can be thought of as the progenitor of the whole phenomenon. The Hunger Games, Twilight, John Green's entire body of work, Harry Potter. The Giver predates all of it, and alongside Enders Game, it is the foundation on which countless subsequent YA authors would build, and by build I mean take the dystopian trappings of and endlessly rehash. Except Mr. Green, who's work tends to not involve the fantastic.
For those in my audience old enough to not have read it in middle school, The Giver the book is essentially 1984 mixed with Brave New World mixed with Fahrenheit 451 the kiddie version. Hum along if you know the words, in the future after an incredibly destructive and nondescript war, a dystopic society has emerged. In this version, state run planned Communities. Every aspect of people's lives is controlled by the Council of Elders, spouses are assigned to people based on a compatibility test, and children are assigned societal roles upon turning eighteen. The way that this dystopia maintains control of the people, rules and ignorance via a policy referred to as Sameness.
The people do not know pain or pleasure, see in monochrome due to genetic engineering, are of only one race, and emotional depth has been removed in exchange for social stability. Our nominal hero is Jonas, a child who is shocked to discover that he has not been assigned a job, but has been chosen to be the Receiver of Memory, a living backup drive of all the things that the Council has excised from the people's lives. He begins attending sessions with the old Reciever and slowly discovers that the world as he has always known it isn't quite right.
When reading the book for school, I always imagined that the Communities looked like a vague amalgam of mid to late 20th Century suburbia, the kind of place and atmosphere that Pleasantville was satirizing, but here it has been replaced by stock YA dystopia setting No. 23. However, I suppose that was inevitable, it was only greenlit to cash in on the success of The Hunger Games, and thus it feels and plays out like the other recent Hunger Games cash in, Divergent.
The film is incredibly fast paced, clocking in at only 94 minutes, and often to it's detriment. I know that part of what makes the written word a unique medium is that it allows you to really get inside a character's head without bogging down your story to do so, and that usually doesn't translate well to visual media, but scenes in The Giver the movie just come and go so quickly there isn't any real weight to them. Especially one scene in particular, which I will have to spoil here in order to explain my point, you have been warned.
SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT...
About a year into Jonas' training, and I'm not sure of that, it's paced so quickly, he discovers a certain truth about his Community. He discovers that part of the way that they removed difference from the general population is through a Spartan style eugenics policy of performing euthanasia on aberrant births. An example of aberrant births, the lighter of a pair of identical twins, having identical people would cause too much confusion. Jonas finds out about this when he watches his father, who is a nurse, performing this activity without a second thought. In Jonas' words "They didn't remove murder, they brought it home, they just gave it a different name." The obvious allegory aside - which I don't have a problem with in principle, you should be able to convey any message you want - in The Giver the book, this scene is haunting, it has an impact, I really stopped and thought after reading it, but in the movie version, it just comes and goes, like everything else.
END SPOILERS
The acting, which might have brought this up above average, is not very good. I don't know if the younger actors were told to deliver their dialogue like this, or if they're just bad, but they talk in a manner that no living human would ever speak. Maybe it was intentional to show how unnatural the policy of Sameness is, like the uncanny valley of social orders, but that doesn't give a pass for a bad performance. The older stars fare a bit better, Jeff Bridges as the old Receiver is fine, and Meryl Streep as the Chief Elder is, while not really developed, serviceable.
When I heard that a Giver movie was happening, I was naively hopeful. I thought that there was some serious potential in this material, and it could be genuinely great, but then I saw this teaser, and thought it would end up becoming an unintentional parody of itself and the YA phenomenon. Then again, it's adapting a work that kicked off this phenomenon, so maybe it was inevitable that when it was brought to the silver screen, not that much would stand out about it anymore. Lois Lowry, the author of the book, evidently stated that dystopian fiction is passe now, and I couldn't agree more. Fans of the book will find a paint by numbers adaptation that hits all the scenes and beats it needs to but brings nothing new to the table, everyone else will find the year's second big profile Hunger Games knock off, and are better off just renting Pleasantville.
Have a nice Day.
Greg.B
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