The quick-cut trailers may spin it like the next “Divergent,” but that’s a marketing ruse: “The Giver,” adapted from the award-winning 1993 novel by Lois Lowry, is something different, slower and more old-school — a kindly grandfather to those YA sagas. Not an insult. Who among us is hungering for another “Hunger Games,” anyway? Director Phillip Noyce (“Salt”) gives us a film that feels more like a fable than a thriller (excepting a rather tacked-on chase ending) with a certain corresponding fuzziness of logic.
But the central premise — that wildness of spirit isn’t something to be tamed, no matter how messy it makes our lives — is an enduring one, and well served by Jeff Bridges in the title role.
From a vague future, narrator and protagonist Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) describes humanity’s reinvention after “The Ruin,” forming communities defined by their adhesion to a rigid code of rules on everything from dress to meds: Everyone gets a morning injection of a libido-killing antidepressant. “Sameness” is the watchword, with the group’s Chief Elder (Meryl Streep, in a regrettable gray wig) praising the beauty of a world in which “disorder became harmony,” not to put too Orwellian a point on it. The result looks like an average upscale subdivision, with manicured walkways, identical houses and a bicycle-sharing system that puts Citi Bike to shame.
Eighteen-year-old Jonas and his friends are on the cusp of graduation, waiting for their career assignments. While his buddy Asher (Cameron Monaghan) gets to pilot drones and pretty Fiona (Odeya Rush) goes to the nursery, Jonas is chosen to become the next Receiver of Memory, as it’s become one person’s job to retain the entire history of humanity’s chaotic past. The current Receiver (Bridges, doing his grizzled-sage thing) imparts this knowledge to Jonas through the laying on of hands, or something like that.
In time, Jonas learns that humans weren’t always Stepford people, devoid of class, religion, sexual desire and even color: The first half of the film is almost entirely black and white, adding to its retro feel.
In a series of Terrence Malick-esque visions, Jonas learns the best and worst of what the world used to be: boisterous wedding parties, impassioned protests, body-strewn battlefields. That last was what did in his predecessor, played by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Taylor Swift, who took one look at humanity’s capacity for bloodshed, and checked out.
“The Giver” is at its best when Bridges expounds on civilization’s lost beauty and savagery; at other times, it’s strewn with implausibility: For a totalitarian society in which everyone is monitored constantly, our hero is able to sneak around an awful lot.
Jonas begins to chafe at the confines of his assigned “family unit,” helmed by designated mom Katie Holmes (fitting unsettlingly well into the zombie-mom role) and father figure Alexander Skarsgard, whose job is to “release” those deemed unsuitable for the community to “elsewhere.” (Three guesses what that really means.) The unsuitable are largely incubator-raised babies and old people, and this plot point seems easy Tea Party fodder.
But the beauty of Lowry’s story is in its broadness of metaphor, reminding us that even at our worst, our emotions and passions and differences are what make life worth living. Personally, I saw it as a clarion call for us to question a life lived online: “Knowing something,” the Giver tells Jonas, “is different from knowing how something feels.”