The lack of color is actually one aspect of Lowry’s vision that hasn’t been compromised. Despite what the trailer seemed to suggest, much of The Giver unfolds in black-and-white, forcing audiences to see its sterilized, climate-controlled world in the same drab shades of gray as its characters do. Primary colors begin to flood the frame only gradually, as Jonas (Brenton Thwaites, bland, but maybe on purpose) gains access to the spectrum of light denied his fellow civilians. Named the new Receiver Of Memories by the elders of the community, the teenage boy pays daily visits to The Giver (Jeff Bridges, perfectly cast), a wizened hermit who shares with him all knowledge of mankind’s troubled past. As he absorbs these ancient impressions—not just of color, but also of weather, holidays, animals, pain, grief, sex, war, and everything else society’s engineers have eliminated—Jonas begins to realize that the perfect world in which he lives isn’t so perfect after all.
As written, The Giver is a cautionary tale about sheltering oneself from experience, and some of its poignant points—about accepting heartache as the price of feeling, about squaring humanity’s capacity for love against its history of hate—have survived the transition from page to screen. But in many ways, Noyce has dumbed down his source material, making concessions to a hypothetical audience. Rather than reveal the details of the world gradually and organically, as Lowry did, the film opens with a hand-holding exposition dump—a choice that stinks of interference from distributor Harvey Weinstein. The more irksome alterations arrive later: Not only do Noyce and his screenwriters needlessly amp up the teen love story and add a race-against-the-clock element to the final act, they also include a scene in which Bridges’ haunted sage actively debates the story’s themes with Meryl Streep’s severe Chief Elder. Is the conversation meant to function like a Cliffs Note, destroying subtext to help young viewers ace their English quiz? In twisting The Giver to resemble a more modern class of YA bestseller, the filmmakers risk stripping it of its individuality. “Sameness,” as the book warned, is not to be celebrated.
