Review: The Giver

City Paper grade: C

It’s almost comical how much YA juggernauts like The Hunger Games and Divergent owe to Lois Lowry’s The Giver, the prototype for every “big-dreamin’ teens in fucked-up future” novel on the shelves. Lowry’s Newbery-winning 1993 book has long been admired and respected by the library set, so it’s disappointing that its long-awaited adaptation plays it so safe, struggling to fit in with the glitzy copycats it begat. In a carefully calibrated world free from suffering, hatred and oppression, Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) and his classmates complete their secondary schooling and are matched with vocations that speak to their personal strengths. (Sound familiar?) Jonas, who possesses a rare mix of attributes, is selected to become the new “Receiver of Memories,” a walking archive of human history — including all the messed-up stuff from which everyone else has been conveniently shielded. As the current Receiver (Jeff Bridges) fills his protégé’s head with the bad, Jonas begins realizing he’s also been deprived of all the good wrought by raw emotion, forcing him to make some difficult decisions on behalf of a society stunted by overreach. Aside from the playful, Instagram-like way director Phillip Noyce transitions between flat black-and-white and hot color a la Pleasantville, The Giver and the people populating it are remarkably bland, dragged laterally over a timeline that telegraphs its every twist in advance. The cast seems more concerned with keeping up with the dystopian Joneses than telling the story that predated the competition. Even Meryl Streep, as the status quo-maintaining Chief Elder, is so complacent she’s nearly napping her way through it.