After a visit to the new Soviet Union in 1919, the great
muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens famously remarked, “I have seen the
future and it works.” In Hollywood, for
many years they have seen the future and … it sucks. Dystopia now replaces any
possibility of happiness in the brave new world that we’d like to think
constitutes the destination of our dreams.
Although both literature and cinema for many years imagined a
dismal future for its contemporary context — the most important literary
influences remain Aldous Huxley and George Orwell — the film industry adopted
the concept wholeheartedly in the 1980’s, interestingly, during the presidency
of Saint Ronald Reagan. In addition to the remake of “1984,” movies like “The
Terminator,” the Mad Max trilogy, and “Escape from New York” created various
versions of the time to come, all of them undesirable.
In “The Giver,” the future, though clean, bright, and
peaceful, remains a place that few should wish to inhabit. Filmed in stark
black and white, with an intermittent narration from its young protagonist,
Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), the picture shows a
community entirely at peace, governed by a rationality that excludes any strong
emotion — love, fear, hatred, anger, etc. — and has banished crime, falsehood,
conflict of any kind, a place where an oppressive politeness stifles
differences or dissent. A sort of atheist’s paradise patrolled by watchful
drones, it allows for no hint of anything supernatural or irrational beyond the
reasoned, placid surface of an ordered life, obliterating by daily injections
faith, emotions, even dreams. The governing ideal is homogeneity, which means
that the citizens dress alike, think alike, and dwell in clusters of the same
sterile, streamlined structures like some futuristic parody of our familiar
lily-white suburbs …
At a ceremony marking the transition of Jonas and his friends
from school to their assigned jobs in life, the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep)
singles out Jonas for the special post of Receiver of Memory. He undergoes
instruction from the Giver of Memory (Jeff Bridges), who introduces him to the
past through books, which don’t exist in the rest of his world, and through a
telepathic process that enables Jonas to experience a human history nobody else
knows; discovering the whole panoply of human emotions he never knew existed. He
witnesses religious festivals all over the world, music and dancing, moments of
love, and even horrifying scenes of death and destruction. Jonas’s black and
white world takes on the colors of ordinary reality and inevitably he learns
how to subvert the processes that have previously imprisoned him in the bland
bliss of his former life.
Learning the lessons of the Giver transforms Jonas in some
predictable ways, turning him into a rebel and a traitor, driven to escape his
ordered world into a future he cannot fully imagine. His perilous journey away
from his community across something called the Boundary of Memory seems silly
and preposterous, somewhat blunting the point of the genuine dystopian satire that
enlivens much of the film. Its predictable conclusion suggests sequels,
presumably based on the rest of the series of young adult novels by Lois Lowry,
whose book inspired “The Giver.”
Perhaps in tune with the boring perfection of their
environment, almost none of the cast rises beyond a sort of functional
blandness themselves. Looking like a high-class witch in a long blond fright wig,
Meryl Streep conveys at least a hint of ambiguity in her arguments for a
rational universe where everybody must conform to maintain peace and
security. Bearded, clothed in attire
different from the relentless whiteness of everybody else’s costumes, Jeff
Bridges on the other hand, provides a stark contrast to the oppressive sameness
of the picture’s world.
The picture demonstrates once again that the cinematic future
allows only two possibilities, both of which owe a debt to Huxley and Orwell. One
is the squalid, violent, dangerous world of “Soylent
Green,” “The Terminator,” “The Road Warrior,” and their ilk; the other is the
smooth, featureless, streamlined wonderland of “2001,” any of the “Star Trek”
franchise, and even most of the later “Star Wars” movies. In one there is no
peace or comfort, in the other no texture, no affect, no unorthodoxy, a dismal
choice indeed.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2014.
