the giver movie review

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20 years ago, Lois Lowry's dystopian YA novel "The Giver" won the Newberry Medal. Creepy and prophetic, told in a kind of flat-affect voice, it has been a staple in middle-school literature curriculum ever since, introducing young students to sophisticated ethical and moral concepts that will help them recognize its precedents when they come to read the works of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. Jeff Bridges has been attached as a producer to the film project for almost 20 years, and finally, "The Giver" is here, with Bridges in the title role. Directed by Phillip Noyce, with an adaptation of the book by Michael Mitnick , "The Giver" gives us the overall structure of Lowry's original work, adds a couple of understandable details like a sweet little romance and then derails into an action movie in its final sequence, complete with attacks from the air and a hi-tech command center. Children have been thrilled by the book for 20 years, and a chase scene still proved irresistible. Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, "The Giver," in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

"The Giver" takes place in a community at some point in the indeterminate future where "Sameness" is prized above all else. Multiple factors have gone into creating a monochromatic world (literally, colors have been erased) where individuality is crushed, a citizen's every move is monitored from the moment of birth, natural families have been replaced by artificial "family units" and choice has vanished. A soothing voice makes passive-aggressive scolding announcements over loudspeakers. The Giver's cavernous dwelling, perched on the edge of a cliff, is a gloomy and masterful set, overlooking the clouds gathered below, making The Giver appear like Citizen Kane, holed up in his mansion surrounded by accumulated possessions and raw pain.

"Precision of language" is enforced, and so people are constantly apologizing and saying "I accept your apology" to each other, but in a rote way that drains the language of meaning. "The Giver" is a cautionary tale about what happens when language is controlled and limited—ground well covered for all time in "1984"—where citizens have no language available to them outside of "newsspeak." Memories are gone, too, in "The Giver". One person in the Community is chosen to be "The Receiver" of a collective memory, memories of now-extinct experiences like love and war and sex and pain. Through the course of the film, the young Jonas ( Brenton Thwaites ), chosen to be the next Receiver, is introduced to complexity and emotion and his entire concept of the world as he knows it shatters. He must now make a choice: to stay or to flee. It's a powerful set-up, made even more stark by Noyce's choice to film the majority of the film in black-and-white. When Jonas starts to see colors again, there are unavoidable " Pleasantville " connections.

Jonas is raised in a family unit, with Katie Holmes and Alexander Skarsgård acting as parental units. He has two best friends, Fiona ( Odeya Rush ) and Asher ( Cameron Monaghan ), and they are about to "graduate from childhood," and take on their assigned jobs in the community. There is a gigantic ceremony, led by the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep, who shows up as a holograph the size of a building), and each child is called to the stage to receive their assignments. The entire community gathers in a massive stadium, everyone dressed in identical white, so it looks like a gigantic celestial choir or a formal-dress LGAT workshop. Everyone speaks in unison. Everyone claps the same way. Everyone looks forward. No one moves. The effect is eerie.

Jonas is surprised when he is not assigned a job at all. He is, instead, "selected" to be the next Receiver, because he apparently has the ability to "see beyond." He has no idea what that means. Jeff Bridges, who becomes The Giver once a new Receiver is chosen, sits in the front row of the stadium, grim and remote. The thousands of people present start to chant in a repetitive whisper, "Jonas … Jonas … Jonas …"

The training sessions, when they come, are part Mr. Miyagi, part vision quest, and part "Quantum Leap." The Giver bombards Jonas with memories from all of humanity, memories that thrust Jonas into the thick of the action: he feels snow falling for the first time, he is shown the full spectrum of colors, he is given shaky-cam experiences of war, he also dances around a Maypole with a saucy wench while wearing a pirate shirt. There are multiple quick-shot montage sequences of smiling babies, praying Muslims, crashing waves, paper lanterns, crying elderly people. The music swells, pushing the emotions on us, but the montages have the opposite effect intended. Instead of revelatory glimpses of the rich tapestry of human experience, they seem like Hallmark-collages uploaded on YouTube. Noyce has also made the questionable choice to co-opt real-world events, and so suddenly we see Tieneman Square in the montage, or the Arab Spring, or Nelson Mandela. It's cheap, hoping to ride the coattails of others, as opposed to finding a visual form and style that will actually express the strength of the human spirit.

Jonas begins to look around him with new eyes. He wants to kiss Fiona. He wants to have the choice to feel things that may be unpleasant. He is not allowed to share his training with others.

The young actors in the film are pretty nondescript, the lead included, although Thwaites seems to come alive in mischievous ways when he starts to take care of a fussy newborn who can't stop crying at night. Holmes and Skarsgård are both strange and unplaceable, playing human beings whose emotions are entirely truncated. "Precision of language, please," says Mother at the dinner table when one of her children starts to speak. Bridges galumphs across the screen, a madman out of Melville, tormented, lonely, in and out of reality. His memories sometimes flatten him. There is one moment where he tells Jonas what the word is for the "feeling between people," and his eyes burn with pain and loss as he says, "Love. It's called love." It's the only powerful moment in the film. His emotion is so palpable it reaches off the screen and grips your throat.

The use of heavy explanatory voiceover to open and close the film is disappointing, especially since a couple of lines have been added to the famous last paragraph of the book. Not surprisingly, the lines added remove it from the moody ambiguous statement of hope that it is in the book, and turn it into a complete platitude. We've heard it a hundred times before. It emanates Sameness with every word.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Giver (2014)

Rated PG-13 for a mature thematic image and some sci-fi action/violence

Jeff Bridges as The Giver

Meryl Streep as Chief Elder

Brenton Thwaites as Jonas

Alexander Skarsgård as Jonas's father

Katie Holmes as Jonas' mother

Odeya Rush as Fiona

Cameron Monaghan as Asher

Taylor Swift as Rosemary

• Phillip Noyce
• Michael Mitnick
• Robert B. Weide

Cinematography

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Common sense media reviewers.

Pain makes life colorful in dystopian adaptation.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie's themes and messages echo the book&

The Giver is a complicated character because he se

Jonas punches his friend in the face after a confr

Some hand holding, longing looks, and a couple of

No language, since in the community, people don

Parents need to know that the The Giver is a dystopian thriller based on author Lois Lowry's best-selling 1993 novel (which has sparked some controversy since its publication and landed on some banned-book lists). Since the novel is commonly used in middle school classrooms, the …

Positive Messages

The movie's themes and messages echo the book's: how Sameness has eradicated personal expression, how conformity is a threat to individuality, how having no choices for the sake of equality is really oppression, and more. The movie also tackles the tough subject of whether pain is necessary for joy and whether love and heartbreak are preferable to stability and community.

Positive Role Models

The Giver is a complicated character because he seems so sad and unhappy, but it's for an understandable reason. He's patient and teaches Jonas and encourages him to see the world for how it really is.

Violence & Scariness

Jonas punches his friend in the face after a confrontation. Two people await lethal injection. An entire society has no idea that the term "releasing" means killing, so when a man "releases" a baby, or a group is told they're being "released," no one but Jonas and the Giver know what's happening. The Giver and Jonas have violent, disturbing dreams and visions of past horrors.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Some hand holding, longing looks, and a couple of kisses. Discussion of how the community handles adolescent "stirrings."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

No language, since in the community, people don't curse.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that the The Giver is a dystopian thriller based on author Lois Lowry's best-selling 1993 novel (which has sparked some controversy since its publication and landed on some banned-book lists). Since the novel is commonly used in middle school classrooms, the adaptation will appeal to tweens and teens who've read and loved it. Although there are some fundamental changes from the book (like the age of Jonas, the main character), the movie shares the book's central themes about the things that make life worth living, even if they're painful. The violent revelations are disturbing, especially ugly truths about what it means when citizens (including a baby) are "released into Elsewhere," but the movie isn't nearly as violent as comparable movies like The Hunger Games or Divergent . Like the movie, the book should launch some thoughtful conversations about totalitarianism, freedom of expression, and why utopian societies fail. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (28)
• Kids say (103)

Based on 28 parent reviews

This movie is definitely one to watch at your next Family Movie Night with your 9+ year old!!!

Emotionally intense, disturbing violent images, what's the story.

THE GIVER takes place in a futuristic utopian society called "the community," where, at age 16, residents prepare for their coming-of-age ceremony, where they're assigned a specific job -- like birth mother, nurturer, teacher, or security. Jonas ( Brenton Thwaites ) is surprised when, at the Ceremony for Advancement, the Chief Elder ( Meryl Streep ) announces that Jonas has been selected as the newest Receiver of Memory -- the one person in the community to understand all the pain and truths that the rest of the society is spared. His teacher will be The Giver of Memory ( Jeff Bridges ), who will impart all of his knowledge. But as Jonas begins his sessions with The Giver, he also starts seeing things as they really are, not as the community wants them to be -- he sees in color (everyone else sees in black and white) and develops feelings for his friend, Fiona ( Odeya Rush ). Worst of all, Jonas realizes that life with pain is preferable to the "Sameness" on which the community is based.

Is It Any Good?

This is an adaptation worth seeing, particularly for the conversations you can have once the credits roll. As anyone who has read Lois Lowry's source novel will immediately notice, the movie's Jonas is five years older than he is in the book (and Thwaites was actually already in his 20s while filming!), making him a full adolescent as opposed to being on the cusp of puberty. While the aging up works when it comes to focusing on the central romantic subplot, it may upset the tweens and younger teens who related to Jonas' journey precisely because he was their age, not a teen on the brink of adulthood like the majority of young adult protagonists. But more bothersome is the fact that viewers -- unlike readers -- are limited in their connection to the cinematic Jonas and what's going on in the community, because it's not really an action story like Divergent -- it's a story of ideas that's better experienced on the page.

Of all the actors, Alexander Skarsgard (as Jonas' father) does the most subtle work, portraying how, even in such a tightly controlled society, some individuals are more loving and nurturing, even if they don't fully understand what love means. Katie Holmes (as Jonas' mother) and Streep both play unquestioning proponents of Sameness, and Rush sure is beautiful, but because feelings are manipulated in the community, The Giver is not a romance on the swoony level of Katniss and Peeta's or Tris and Four's. The characters in the community, with the exception of Jonas and the Giver, must by their very nature act eerily dispassionate, even-keeled, and neutral about everything -- even throwing a dead baby down a garbage chute. That flatness, which is so freaky in the book, doesn't work quite as well on the screen.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the popularity of dystopian settings in young adult literature and movies. What is it about futuristic stories that appeals to readers and viewers?

How would you describe the violence in this movie? Is it scary? Disturbing? Why? Are there other parts of the movie that are nonviolent but also upsetting? How do they compare?

It took more than 20 years after the book was published for The Giver to hit the big screen. How do you think that timing affected its impact?

Fans of the book: Was the movie a faithful adaptation? What differences did/didn't you like, and which scenes from the book did you miss?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 15, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : November 25, 2014
• Cast : Alexander Skarsgard , Jeff Bridges , Meryl Streep , Brenton Thwaites
• Director : Phillip Noyce
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Weinstein Co.
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters
• Run time : 94 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : a mature thematic image and some sci-fi action/violence
• Last updated : September 24, 2023

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Movie Review

If You Want to Remember, You Have to Ask the Old Guy

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By Manohla Dargis

• Aug. 14, 2014

By the time the sounds of the Von Trapp children warbling “Silent Night” drift through “The Giver,” you may find yourself wondering what fresh movie hell this is. In truth, the enervating hash of dystopian dread, vague religiosity and commercial advertising-style uplift is nothing if not stale. Adapted from Lois Lowry ’s book for young readers, the story involves an isolated society that, with its cubistic dwellings, mindless smiles, monochromatic environs and nebulous communitarianism, seem modeled on a Scandinavian country or an old Mentos commercial.

The black-and-white world of the setting also suggests that you’re back in Kansas, as do the flickering rainbow colors that can be seen only by Jonas (Brenton Thwaites). Jonas lives with his “family unit” (Alexander Skarsgard and Katie Holmes play his folks) in a culture as quiet, cold and inert as a crypt. Along with his friends, Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan), Jonas is about to become a worker bee. Once grown, each citizen is assigned to a specific job, explains the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep, who seems to have borrowed her severe gray ’do from Holly Hunter in “Top of the Lake”). Some are designated nurturers; others become pilots, gardeners and so on.

Jonas becomes the Receiver of Memory, which means that he gets to hang out with the only jumpy cat in this mausoleum, the Giver, an older dude played by Jeff Bridges with a muffled voice and a grizzled beard. The inhabitants of this world, like members of some crazy cult, decided long ago to banish memories along with bright colors, flattering clothing and emotions. Well, more or less: They also decided that one resident would always be the society’s custodian of collective memories and would, in time, pass this storehouse of remembrances on to the next Receiver. That’s how and why Jonas ends up in a house filled with books and perched at this world’s outer limits.

What follows is the usual hero’s journey mixed in with sloppy montage sequences that are meant to represent the memories the Giver is passing to Jonas but mostly evoke one of those tear-jerking commercials that sell their wares with gurgling babies and squirming puppies. The director Phillip Noyce — working with a lamentable script credited to Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide, and saddled with cheap digital effects and sets that needed more money or imagination or both — can’t do much here, but doesn’t seem to be trying hard, either. About the only other thing worth mentioning is that this is yet another cinematic dystopia, in the wake of “Elysium” and “Divergent,” with a villainous female leader. That old Sonic Youth line about “fear of a female planet” is in no danger of becoming irrelevant.

“The Giver,” the first book in the Giver Quartet, was published in 1993 and almost immediately eyed by Mr. Bridges as a screen property. In the decades since, publishers and filmmakers have continued to exploit the seemingly interminable craze for young-adult bummers with varying success. Ms. Lowry’s “The Giver” preceded both the “Hunger Games” and “Divergent” book series, to name two popular feel-bad sagas. Yet because both “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” hit the screen first, the movie version of “The Giver” — scene by formulaic scene, narrative cliché by cliché — can’t help but come off as a poor copy of those earlier pictures.

In the end, it taketh — your time, patience and faith in newly imagined dystopias — more than it giveth.

“The Giver” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Infanticide and child endangerment.

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The Giver Reviews

As both an adaptation and a stand-alone film, The Giver is something of a mess.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022

Noyce and company have made a reverent film that both honors its beloved beginnings and provides audiences with a thoughtful piece of family entertainment.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

Taylor Swift showed up as a piano-playing hologram with a bad wig and it officially became a comedy.

Full Review | Aug 13, 2021

A small movie with big ideas about individual freedoms, memory, traditions and customs. Important themes one and all, but they're wrapped in a movie that does not do them justice.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 1, 2021

To my own surprise I ended up enjoying this movie more than I anticipated I would after the first few minutes in.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 20, 2020

The cast is truly the thing in Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Lois Lowry's YA novel The Giver.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 8, 2020

Noyce's cinematography is striking, shifting from dullish gray to the full spectrum of the rainbow, but the movie's plot and final denouement are telegraphed from virtually its first nanosecond.

Full Review | Aug 13, 2020

Bland and flavorless.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 7, 2020

For a film that claims to champion colorful nonconformity, The Giver is depressingly drab.

Full Review | Jan 8, 2020

The powerful allegory that initially made Lowry's text such a lasting achievement seems cheapened by the glossy, over baked screen version that seems more medicated than the anesthetized minds of its characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 30, 2019

This could have been an actual "young adult" film, letting preteens know that the conflicting waves of emotion they're about to receive are worth it. Instead, it's a movie where a holographic cameo by Taylor Swift isn't the worst part.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Aug 6, 2019

Although the film has a few merits, including the deft use of a colour motif that harks back to Oz, a dull and predictable ending does nothing to help it overall: the studio clearly has its fingers crossed for yet another series.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 25, 2019

Read the book instead.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Apr 30, 2019

Yet in its execution, the whole lacks the courage of its convictions with no sign of the drama necessary to make it as thought-provoking it pretends to be.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2019

But with 94 minutes of running time, it would have benefited from additional scenes... instead of an extensive introduction narrative and rushing through the third act with action towards a rather abrupt ending.

Full Review | Jan 25, 2019

Despite the fact that I'm an adult who has never read the book, I still felt like I was being pandered to. It didn't need to be that way.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 11, 2018

"The Giver" succeeds in entertaining in the way it reminds us what makes the human race so special...the ability to love.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 21, 2018

The bottom line is that if you focus on its message, The Giver has some very important things to say. You just might find yourself a little frustrated with the information you get (or rather, don't get) along the way.

Full Review | Nov 28, 2017

Despite the impressive cast (Taylor Swift has a cameo), performances are uneven.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 14, 2017

The performances by all the characters are adequate, but the story had a friend and me riveted to the screen. But then, we like movies that are actually about something.

Full Review | Aug 10, 2017

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The Giver – first look review: Utopia isn't all it's cracked up to be, again

Phillip Noyce’s futureworld looks great and despite a dodgy script and some familiar tropes it gets the essentials right

Jeff Bridges tells Comic-Con of struggle to get Lois Lowry’s The Giver filmed

T he Giver film, based on the popular young adult novel published in 1993, is a healthy mix of Brave New World, Foundation, Fahrenheit 451, Logan’s Run, 1984 and several other sci-fi treatises. But in addition to these classic works, the film can’t escape some of the Young Adult film tropes we’ve been inundated with of late, right down to the love triangles and power of destiny. As such, many of the plot mechanics, as opposed to headier social science themes, feel familiar, and this isn’t a good thing.

Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) lives in a Garden of Epcot, a perfect classless society in a future with no war, no hunger and where it hardly every rains. Everyone’s crisp white clothing and polite, sunny demeanour comes, of course, at a cost unknown to them. The citizens of this utopia are actually being drugged, constantly observed and the glorious culture only works, it’s discovered, due to a complex system of cruel eugenics and euthanasia. The Giver’s kick, however, is that the Community’s elders (led by Meryl Streep, who, unfortunately, gets little screen time, and what she does is via future-Skype) aren’t even sure themselves just how they are oppressing the citizenry. The powerful know they are pulling strings in an abstract sense, but are still wilfully (and blissfully) ignorant of specifics. You see, at some point after a devastating war, this society was built in such a way that knowledge of history would be verboten . All that exists is equanimity and sameness.

But someone along the way recognised that running things, even a controlled society, can be difficult. We need the wisdom of history in order to learn from our past. Thus one chosen individual is the Receiver of Memory, a living, breathing Wikipedia, the only person in town who knows about snow or laughing puppies or piano concertos. Or kissing. The flip side is, he’ll be the one who knows about death, violence and loss.

Jeff Bridges, bearded and working some inscrutable funny accent, is the current Receiver, but Jonas is the next Chosen One. The bulk of the movie dives in to explore the corners of this slightly familiar (Logan’s Run’s “Carousel” is just called “Elsewhere”) but still fascinating set-up. One can easily see why this is such a popular book, especially with teens roiling with angst and hoping to lash out at society. Young Jonas broods at home and around his former classmates and actually wouldn’t be wrong if he shouted “none of you understand me!” But he’s a good kid and he soon realises that his destiny lies in tearing the system down.

Phillip Noyce, whose better films include Dead Calm, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Salt, exploits a nice gimmick rooted in the story’s mythos. Those fully entrenched in the community (let’s call it Giverdale) see everything in black and white, but as sensei Bridges starts mind-melding with Jonas, colour starts to work its way into the frame. Again, this is a trick we’ve seen before (Pleasantville, Zentropa – aka Europa) but if you buy The Giver’s subtext that all of human existence is the repetition and reinterpretation of the same story, these constant feelings of thematic deja vu help it sell the premise.

The Giver is a mid-budget film but it still looks great. There’s still no finer film detailing a futureworld suburbia than Woody Allen’s Sleeper, but the well-lit and nicely maintained parks of The Giver make a good case for a lifestyle of historical ignorance and curated vocabulary. There’s also the recurring three-point visual motif, which extends, naturally, to best bud Asher (Cameron Monaghan) and gal pal Fiona (Odeya Rush). Indeed, Jonas and Fiona meet for secret whispers inside a bit of landscaping that slightly resembles a woman’s pubic triangle, the penetration point being a gush of water that accentuates everyone’s form-fitting clothing.

These pleasures aside, there’s the problem of the script. Some of the dialogue is atrocious. Many times exposition or bright ideas are just dumped on the screen like a harried mother leaving her kids at summer camp. There are some tweaks to the ending not found in the book that really don’t make a whole lot of sense, but work as big movie moments of heightened tension and visual effects. By the end of the movie few won’t be rolling their eyes or checking their watch, but there’s enough that’s fundamentally good in the meat of film not to wholly reject what The Giver is giving us.

Comments have been reopened to coincide with the film’s Australian release.

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In a seemingly perfect community without war, pain, suffering, differences or choices, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man, the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world. In a seemingly perfect community without war, pain, suffering, differences or choices, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man, the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world. In a seemingly perfect community without war, pain, suffering, differences or choices, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man, the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world.

• Phillip Noyce
• Michael Mitnick
• Robert B. Weide
• Brenton Thwaites
• Jeff Bridges
• Meryl Streep
• 414 User reviews
• 209 Critic reviews
• 47 Metascore
• 3 wins & 6 nominations

• Chief Elder

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• Trivia Jeff Bridges had been trying to have the film made for nearly 20 years and even filmed a version of it with his family. Speaking on the Nerdist Podcast he said: "I originally wanted to direct my father in it. As a matter of fact, somewhere in some garage, there is a version of this movie with my father ( Lloyd Bridges ) playing The Giver, Bud Cort narrates the whole thing, Beau's kids, one is shooting it, one is playing Jonas. We did the whole book, so that's around somewhere."
• Goofs When Jonas flees through various terrain and weather conditions at the end of the movie, his wardrobe changes a number of times to where he finally wears a thick winter parka. All the while he never has a backpack or bag or anything with him and the baby when he initially flees on the motor bike. And where could he have even gotten a spare parka from anyway, since the whole society was climate controlled to perpetual summer-like conditions?

Chief Elder : When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong--every single time.

• Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Jeff Bridges/Ali Larter/Andy Woodhull (2014)
• Soundtracks Silent Night Lyrics by Joseph Mohr Music by Franz Xaver Gruber (Incorrectly attributed as "Traditional") Performed by The von Trapp Children Courtesy of Rattlesby Records, Inc.

User reviews 414

• Nov 16, 2014
• August 15, 2014 (United States)
• South Africa
• United States
• Official site
• Official Twitter
• Người Truyền Ký Ức
• University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (Some exteriors)
• Tonik Productions
• Asis Productions
• Canada Film Capital
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $25,000,000 (estimated)
• $45,090,374
• $12,305,016
• Aug 17, 2014
• $66,980,456

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 37 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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Film Review: ‘The Giver’

What Lois Lowry hath given in her bestselling YA novel, this flaccid screen adaptation taketh away.

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

• Film Review: ‘Black Mass’ 9 years ago
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Sameness, the conformist plague that afflicts the futuristic citizens of Lois Lowry’s celebrated and scorned YA novel, “The Giver,” might also be the name given to what ails the movie adaptation — the latest in a seemingly endless line of teen-centric dystopian fantasies that have become all but indistinguishable from one another. A longtime passion project for producer/star Jeff Bridges , “The Giver” reaches the screen in a version that captures the essence of Lowry’s affecting allegory but little of its mythic pull — a recipe likely to disappoint fans while leaving others to wonder what all the fuss was about. Any hopes by co-producers the Weinstein Co. and Walden Media that they might have the next “Hunger Games” (or even “Divergent”) on their hands look to be dashed by lackluster late-summer box office.

Originally published in 1993 (six years before “The Matrix”), Lowry’s novel was itself a patchwork of ideas borrowed from Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Jack Finney and Ray Bradbury in its depiction of totalitarian groupthink masquerading as peaceable utopia. The setting was an unnamed anywhere known only as “the community,” whose residents had achieved a post-Platonic, post-Marxist ideal of a classless, conflict-free (and, though not explicitly stated, seemingly race-free) society through the chemical suppression of emotion and the erasure of all suspect stimuli (including books, colors, weather, and sex) from the historical record. Exempt from this rigorous burning of the past was one man: the Receiver of Memory, a grizzled community elder charged with keeping all human experience from time immemorial catalogued inside his own understandably addled brain.

If Lowry’s ideas weren’t anything new to genre buffs or sociology majors, what made her book so compulsively readable was the lucid simplicity of its prose and the surprising complexity of its arguments (especially for a novel aimed at children). Unlike a lot of speculative fiction, “The Giver” wasn’t a cautionary tale about nuclear or environmental apocalypse, but rather an envisaging of the even greater horror show we might effect through our ostensibly best impulses: to rid society of war, famine and other forms of suffering. It was a highly adaptable metaphor for any form of organized rhetoric, be it that of the religious right or the bleeding-heart left. And, taking a page from J.D. Salinger, Lowry didn’t just suggest that most adults were duplicitous phonies, but that they were capable of secretly murdering babies and the elderly without batting an eye. (Little wonder that “The Giver” was said to be banned from almost as many schools as made it compulsory reading.)

In bringing the book to the screen, director Phillip Noyce and screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide have stayed reasonably faithful to the plot and characters while jettisoning much of the philosophical weight and making other, perhaps inevitable concessions to commerce. A mere 12 years old on the page, Lowry’s nonconformist hero, Jonas, is here played by the 25-year-old Australian actor Brenton Thwaites , while the incidental character of the community’s Chief Elder has been padded out into a ghoulish, Nurse Ratched-esque villain role for Meryl Streep (who appears alternately in real and holographic form, and seems equally disembodied in each). And with only partial success, Noyce, who’s long been one of the best action directors around (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger,” “Salt”), tries to turn Lowry’s elegant, open-ended climax into a large-scale setpiece involving speeding motorbikes, drone aircraft and storm-trooper thugs rounding up dissidents into a Guantanamo-like prison.

The movie begins well enough, with our introduction to the community and its functional “dwellings” where Jonas lives with his dutiful but distant parents ( Alexander Skarsgard and Katie Holmes ) and younger sister, Lily (Emma Tremblay). Working on a modest budget, production designer Ed Verreaux and costume designer Diana Cilliers have given the film the spare, modular look of mid-century modernism — a feeling further enhanced by Noyce’s decision to shoot almost the entire first 30 minutes of the movie in low-contrast black-and-white, with color only gradually seeping into the frames as Jonas learns to “see beyond” (a variation on the technique employed by the 1998 “Pleasantville,” which itself may have been influenced by Lowry).

From there, “The Giver” goes on to chart the developing bond between the Receiver (Bridges) and Jonas, who has been selected to inherit the great storehouse of memory and carry on the older man’s legacy. The Receiver is Bridges in full-on stoner Buddha mode — a routine the actor has done so many times now (most recently in “Tron: Legacy”) that it should have descended into self-parody. And yet, Bridges is the most affecting thing in the movie — a man physically and spiritually exhausted by having to carry the emotional weight of the world on his shoulders. The same, unfortunately, can not be said of Thwaites, who barely registered as the young prince in “Maleficent” and makes even less of an impression here. As Jonas takes on ever more of the Receiver’s wisdom and experience, he’s meant to be shaken and stirred, pushed to the very brink of psychological endurance, but Thwaites plays it all with the same unwavering expression of sleepy, dumbstruck awe, more Harry Styles than Harry Potter.

Elsewhere, Israeli newcomer Odeya Rush flashes an entrancing come-hither stare, but otherwise sets off few sparks as the unrequited object of Jonas’ proscribed affections (or “stirrings,” as they’re known in community-speak), while country star Taylor Swift feels like the equivalent of human product placement in a thankless walk-on. But it’s hard to know what exactly to feel for Holmes, who’s casting as exactly the kind of dead-eyed Stepford wife the tabloids proffered during the TomKat years seems like someone’s idea of a cruel joke.

This year at the movies has given us two superior dystopia tales — “The Lego Movie” and “Snowpiercer” — rich in the kind of real emotion “The Giver” talks about a lot but never achieves. Instead, the more vibrant experience supposedly flows into the movie, the more canned everything seems. In the novel, Lowry conveyed the Receiver’s transmitted memories as indelible fragments of primal experience: the feeling of sun and snow against bare skin; the suffering of an innocent animal; the aftermath of a bloody combat. Noyce gives us those sensations, too, but he isn’t content to stop there, amping up Jonas’ visions into frenetic montages of global chaos and togetherness that feel like a cross between a Microsoft ad and a Save the Children infomercial. Skydivers plummet from dizzying heights, river rafters navigate raging rapids, the Berlin Wall crumbles and Tiananmen Square revolts. All that’s missing is a Peter Gabriel song.

Reviewed at Dolby 88, New York, Aug. 11, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 97 MIN.

• Production: A Weinstein Co. release presented with Walden Media of a Tonik/As Is Prods. production in association with Yucaipa Films. Produced by Nikki Silver, Jeff Bridges, Neil Koenigsberg. Executive producers, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Dylan Sellers, Ron Burkle, Alison Owen, Ralph Winter, Scooter Braun.
• Crew: Directed by Phillip Noyce. Screenplay, Michael Mitnick, Robert B. Weide, based on the novel by Lois Lowry. Camera (color, widescreen), Ross Emery; editor, Barry Alexander Brown; music, Marco Beltrami; music supervisor, Dana Sano; production designer, Ed Verreaux; supervising art director, Shira Hockman; art director, Catherine Palmer; set decorator, Andrew McCarthy; costume designer, Diana Cilliers; sound, Nico Louw; supervising sound editors, Philip Stockton, Paul Hsu; re-recording mixers, Paul Hsu, Michael Barry; visual effects supervisor, Robert Grasmere; visual effects producer, Paul V. Molles; visual effects, Method Studios, Mr. X Gotham, UPP, Crazy Horse East, The Molecule, Ensemble; ;stunt coordinators, Cordell McQueen, Frank Bare; line producer, Janine van Assen; associate producer/assistant director, Noga Isackson; second unit director, Robert Grasmere; second unit camera, Michael Swan; casting, Mary Vernieu, Venus Kanani.
• With: Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Alexander Skarsgard, Katie Holmes, Taylor Swift, Cameron Monaghan, Odeya Rush, Emma Tremblay, Jefferson Mays.

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‘The Giver’ movie review: Lois Lowry’s award-winning novel comes to life

" The Giver ," an adaptation of Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning young adult novel , may seem like it's riding on the coattails of such dystopian action hits as " The Hunger Games " and " Divergent ." But in reality, Lowry's book may qualify as the ur-text of the form, a slim, futuristic allegory that, since it was published in 1993, has sold more than 10 million copies.

In its own way, the movie version — handsomely directed by Phillip Noyce and featuring an appealing, sure-footed cast of emerging and veteran actors — aptly reflects “The Giver’s” pride of place as the one that started it all, or at least the latest wave. Ironically, it wasn’t until its imitators became box office bonanzas that “The Giver” was seen potentially profitable enough to produce for the big screen. Far less noisy and graphically violent than those films, this mournful coming-of-age tale feels like their more subdued and introspective older sibling, even as it trafficks in the self-dramatizing emotionalism and simplistic philosophizing that are so recognizably symptomatic of the YA genre.

Set in an indeterminate future long after a vaguely drawn catastrophe called The Ruin, “The Giver” chronicles the story of Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), a teenager who has grown up in the Communities, where the all-seeing, all-hearing Council of Elders controls everything from domestic arrangements and careers to climate and sexual “stirrings,” which are carefully regulated by way of daily morning injections.

Jonas’s world, which he navigates with his best friends, Fiona (the stunning Israeli actress Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan), is one in which all conflict, hatred and distinction has been erased by cultural values of conformity and obedience. This is a literally color-blind society, its black-and-white contours reflecting not only the Elders’ monotonously authoritarian sensibility, but Lowry’s own conveniently Manichean imagination, in which emotions and empiricism are at constant zero-sum odds.

As "The Giver" begins, Jonas and his contemporaries are about to find out what jobs they've been assigned by the chief Elder, played by Meryl Streep in a long gray wig that recalls Holly Hunter's blunt-spoken separatist leader in the series " Top of the Lake ." It turns out that Jonas — who, unlike his friends and family, is able to see color — has been chosen to be a Receiver of Memory, meaning that he will soon learn all that happened before the world became the reassuringly predictable and consistent bubble in which he grew up.

His guide in this endeavor is the title character of “The Giver,” a bearded sage living in an isolated mountaintop aerie played with shamanic gruffness by Jeff Bridges. As it happens, Bridges himself was the prime engine in getting “The Giver” made after a decades-long struggle, during which he intended that his father, Lloyd, play the part he ultimately took as his own. That commitment and seriousness of purpose suffuse a production that will surely please the millions of people who read “The Giver” in middle school, and for whom it became much more than a good book and more like a potent talisman of their own emerging notions of individuation, moral choice and transcendent self-sacrifice.

Although Jonas is only 12 in the book, in the filmed version of "The Giver" he is 16 — and played by an Australian in his mid-20s, a digression from novelistic detail that has already sent Lowry's partisans into howls of how-dare-they distress . But Thwaites, who was recently seen as a handsome prince in " Maleficent ," acquits himself well in a role that makes the most of his sober, Gary Cooper-esque good looks. Filmed in silvery tones of black and white, "The Giver" gradually gives way to a color scheme that is lurid or muted, depending on what experiences Jonas is accessing with the help of his grizzled mentor.

Although those memories will eventually send him on a genuine physical ad­ven­ture, replete with a shattering revelation and high-stakes drone chase, most of the film traces a young man’s dawning awareness that, the ease and peacefulness of his world notwithstanding, there’s something frighteningly toxic at its core. (One quibble with “The Giver” is that, at a sleek hour-and-a-half, some of its most dramatically ripe scenes play too quickly and perfunctorily to convey the impact they’re having on Jonas; no sooner has he witnessed an unspeakable horror than it swiftly disappears, filed away in his burgeoning internal archive.)

Like its fellow YA movies — which with the current juggernaut of comic-book adaptations represent the dominant culture in Hollywood — “The Giver” perceptively caters to its teenaged fans’ own cardinal desires and anxieties. Messy feelings, youthful curiosity and unruly physical impulses are valorized and elevated, in sharp contrast to the Elders’ Stalinistic attempts at social control. As a Receiver of Memory, and in one of the film’s most obvious nods to teenaged wish fulfillment, Jonas is given permission to ask questions, no matter how rude, and to lie — and he never has to apologize.

Meanwhile, what he hears from parents and other authority figures is portrayed as the stuff of dehumanizing soul-murder. “Precision of language!” Jonas’s mother scolds him when he shares his feelings one night over dinner. Mom, by the way, is played by Katie Holmes in a suitably chilly performance as a rule-obsessed judge, intimations of the actress’s own recent brush with Scientology hovering over her scenes like a teasing, troubling mist.

Jonas’s father, equally skillfully portrayed by Alexander Skarsgard, features prominently in “The Giver’s” most disturbing sequence, in which Jonas witnesses one of the grisly realities beneath the anodyne double-speak that he’s now beginning to question.

That double-speak, of course, recalls George Orwell at his most anti-totalitarian, as well as Ray Bradbury's " Fahrenheit 451 ," which may be "The Giver's" most direct ancestor. Like " The Fault in Our Stars " earlier this summer, young people have once again been given their generation's version of a message that, although not necessarily new, nevertheless may feel urgent and uniquely timely to its core audience. "The Giver" has been made with deep respect for that experience, and for the book that so powerfully predicted the grim universe movie teenagers now inhabit — for worse and, in this case, for better as well.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains a mature thematic image and some sci-fi action/violence. 94 minutes.