The Giver was never a part of my middle school required reading. But it was close. My sixth grade teacher assigned my class different Newberry books that we were supposed to present to each other. The Giver group made a Life knockoff board game for us to play. In the game you lost your comfort object, were assigned a career (like Birthmother), and entered the House of the Old. The game looked cool enough to sell me on their book. I got my hands on it, devoured it, and put it up there with my coverless Goosebumps and shredded up Harry Potters. The world in The Giver was so detailed that it sucked me right in, giving me a connection to the characters and investment in changing their seemingly perfect world, and leaving my eleven-year-old self new questions about choice and consequences, freedom and safety, good and evil.
Basically what I’m saying is that the board game looks like a more faithful adaptation than the upcoming film.
I had no idea that The Giver was being turned into a movie until I glimpsed the newly released trailer. The intrigue I felt when I started watching quickly turned into impotent internet rage. And I was far from the only one to feel that way. The biggest complaint around the web seemed to be along the lines of BUT WHY ISN’T IT BLACK AND WHITE?!?!Fortunately, it seems that the trailer was misleading and that the movie will be in black and white after all. But still, there was something off about the trailer that went beyond the color or lack thereof.
I’m not a book purist or a fanatic fanboy. I was actually excited for a Giver movie; hell, I think a Giver movie has the potential to surpass the book. Film is a visual medium, and The Giver presents its fair share of fascinating, emotionally compelling images. In the right hands, The Giver movie could use color artistically, in the same vein as films like Pleasantville and Schindler’s List to help get across the quieter, introspective moments of the book, giving audiences a powerful cinematic experience. It doesn’t look like we’re getting this. The old saying “never judge a movie by its trailer” may very well be true, but I’m skeptical. It looks like we’re getting more of the same, Hollywood’s brand of “Sameness,” with this classic children’s story jumping on The Hunger Games inspired, YA bandwagon.
The biggest red flag was the obvious fact that the trailer is in color, while the world of The Giver is in black and white. This has apparently been changed, as the final film will have both color and black and white. Count this as one of the positives for the film (though why they couldn’t just include it in the trailer to begin with…). In the novel, citizens can no longer perceive color as a result of adapting Sameness, a vaguely explained policy that eliminates physical and emotional differences, promoting blissful drooly peace. Protagonist Jonas is chosen to be the new Receiver of Memory partly because he can see color at times; he sees a flicker of red in an apple, which naturally confuses the ever loving hell out of him. Slowly, as he starts to receive memories of the past, he begins to see color all of the time. Color is used as a metaphor for Jonas’s opening up to the possibilities of choice and individuality. It would make for an incredible narrative to use color that way, starting out as solidly black and white and gradually turning to full color.
One of the not-so-good things is that the characters were aged up, from twelve-year-olds to late teens, with Jonas’s actor being twenty-four. Of all of the changes, this might seem the least important. General audiences wouldn’t want to watch a movie starring children (though the popularity of The Goonies, Harry Potter, E.T., and The Sixth Sense would suggest otherwise). Regardless, it still manages to change some key thematic elements of the story. Jonas is a preteen/young teenager just going through puberty. He starts taking a daily pill (which seems to have been changed to injections in the film, probably cuz it is seems like the now popular faux sci-fi) to repress his sexual urges. By aging the characters up, this plot point would need to be changed or radically eliminated, since it’s less believable that a seventeen-year-old boy only just stated puberty.
More importantly, it alters the theme. Some have criticized The Giver’s brand as a children’s book; what with its depictions of infanticide, parents telling their child that they don’t love him, and graphic memories of war and animal cruelty. This is too scary for children, critics have said, too “real” for them to comprehend. Actually, it’s perfect for that middle school age group. Jonas, at twelve, is experiencing a loss of innocence: for the first time in his life, he’s seeing the world as it really is, baby killing and all. Twelve is an age when many children undergo their own loss of innocence. Suddenly, their world isn’t as nice and simple as it once was; feelings become more complicated, problems more challenging, and once pleasant things show a dark side. The loss of innocence that many children go through during puberty is mirrored by Jonas’s journey in The Giver. In a way, Jonas’s story becomes a metaphor for our own coming of age, and all of the unpleasantness involved in it. Aging the characters up loses that key connection.
The aesthetics of the film pose another problem. This may seem a tad nitpicky, but hear me out. The film portrays a sci-fi world on steroids, where everything is sleek and sterile and high tech. It wouldn’t look out of place as the set of any other futuristic world, from The Hunger Games down to 1984. That was not the vibe from the book. Some people saw the book setting as a simple village. I saw it as a small, neat suburb, with all of the houses identical. Either way, simplicity is the key—there were no space ships, cars, or other fancy gadgets. This isn’t a simple book-to-movie change, but a radical (and unoriginal) difference, completely out of sync with the spirit of the book.
The clothing and hairstyles pose a similar problem. In the film, people have unique hair and clothes, some of which is pretty elaborate. In The Giver, hairstyles are assigned based on age and gender, and everyone wore plain, no-frills tunics. As a result, everyone looks the same, fitting in with the community’s decision to adopt Sameness. Again, this isn’t a little difference. In the book, the outward appearance reflects the practice of Sameness; in the film, it’s just “eh, whatever.”
The thing that bothers me the most, though, is the YA overtones. YA—short for Young Adult—technically refers to any book aimed at teenagers, but has lately started to take on a new meaning. New YA always seems to include a love triangle of sorts, a dystopian government, a futuristic setting, and a seemingly ordinary protagonist who turns out to be extra super special. This pattern, especially in film adaptations, seems to have increased as a result of the phenomenal success of The Hunger Games, and now there doesn’t seem to be enough YA to adapt. The Giver is the latest victim of this—and I say “victim,” because on its own, The Giver really doesn’t fit the mold. The movie tweaked and remodeled it so it would fit these new moneymaking qualities, leaving out all of the originality of the original. Which is a shame. A thoughtful adaption, made by someone who knows film while respecting the source material, could have been groundbreaking. Ironically, a beloved fable about the power of individuality and the dangers of Sameness seems to have fallen victim to Hollywood’s brand of Sameness.
judeclee 