
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
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20 years ago, Lois Lowry's dystopian YA novel "The Giver" won the Newberry
Medal. Creepy and prophetic, told in a kind of flat-affect voice, it
has been a staple in middle-school literature curriculum ever since,
introducing young students to sophisticated ethical and moral concepts
that will help them recognize its precedents when they come to read the
works of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. Jeff Bridges has been attached
as a producer to the film project for almost 20 years, and finally, "The
Giver" is here, with Bridges in the title role. Directed by Phillip
Noyce, with an adaptation of the book by Michael Mitnick, "The Giver"
gives us the overall structure of Lowry's original work, adds a couple
of understandable details like a sweet little romance and then derails
into an action movie in its final sequence, complete with attacks from
the air and a hi-tech command center. Children have been thrilled by
the book for 20 years, and a chase scene still proved irresistible.
Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, "The Giver,"
in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices
subtlety, inference and power.
"The Giver" takes place in a community at some point in the
indeterminate future where "Sameness" is prized above all else. Multiple factors have gone into creating a
monochromatic world (literally, colors have been erased) where
individuality is crushed, a citizen's every move is monitored from the
moment of birth, natural families have been replaced by artificial
"family units" and choice has vanished. A soothing voice
makes passive-aggressive scolding announcements over loudspeakers. The
Giver's cavernous dwelling, perched on the edge of a cliff, is a gloomy
and masterful set, overlooking the clouds gathered below, making The
Giver appear like Citizen Kane, holed up in his mansion surrounded by
accumulated possessions and raw pain.
"Precision of language" is
enforced, and so people are constantly apologizing and saying "I accept
your apology" to each other, but in a rote way that drains the language
of meaning. "The Giver" is a cautionary tale about what happens when
language is controlled and limited—ground well covered for all time in
"1984"—where citizens have no language available to them outside of
"newsspeak." Memories are gone, too, in "The Giver". One person in the
Community is chosen to be "The Receiver" of a collective memory,
memories of now-extinct experiences like love and war and sex and pain.
Through the course of the film, the young Jonas (Brenton Thwaites),
chosen to be the next Receiver, is introduced to complexity and emotion
and his entire concept of the world as he knows it shatters. He must
now make a choice: to stay or to flee. It's a powerful set-up, made even
more stark by Noyce's choice to film the majority of the film in
black-and-white. When Jonas starts to see colors again, there are
unavoidable "Pleasantville" connections.
Jonas is raised in a family unit, with Katie Holmes and Alexander
Skarsgård acting as parental units. He has two best friends, Fiona
(Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan), and they are about to
"graduate from childhood," and take on their assigned jobs in the
community. There is a gigantic ceremony, led by the Chief Elder (Meryl
Streep, who shows up as a holograph the size of a building), and each
child is called to the stage to receive their assignments. The entire
community gathers in a massive stadium, everyone dressed in identical
white, so it looks like a gigantic celestial choir or a formal-dress
LGAT workshop. Everyone speaks in unison. Everyone claps the same way. Everyone looks forward. No one moves. The effect is eerie.
Jonas is surprised when he is not assigned a job at all. He is, instead,
"selected" to be the next Receiver, because he apparently has the
ability to "see beyond." He has no idea what that means. Jeff Bridges,
who becomes The Giver once a new Receiver is chosen, sits in the front
row of the stadium, grim and remote. The thousands of people present
start to chant in a repetitive whisper, "Jonas … Jonas … Jonas …"
The training sessions, when they come, are part Mr. Miyagi, part vision
quest, and part "Quantum Leap." The Giver bombards Jonas with memories
from all of humanity, memories that thrust Jonas into the thick of the
action: he feels snow falling for the first time, he is shown the full
spectrum of colors, he is given shaky-cam experiences of war, he also
dances around a Maypole with a saucy wench while wearing a pirate shirt.
There are multiple quick-shot montage sequences of smiling babies,
praying Muslims, crashing waves, paper lanterns, crying elderly people.
The music swells, pushing the emotions on us, but the montages have the
opposite effect intended. Instead of revelatory glimpses of the rich
tapestry of human experience, they seem like Hallmark-collages uploaded
on YouTube. Noyce has also made the questionable choice to co-opt
real-world events, and so suddenly we see Tieneman Square in the
montage, or the Arab Spring, or Nelson Mandela. It's cheap, hoping to
ride the coattails of others, as opposed to finding a visual form and
style that will actually express the strength of the human spirit.
Jonas begins to look around him with new eyes. He wants to kiss Fiona.
He wants to have the choice to feel things that may be unpleasant. He is
not allowed to share his training with others.
The young actors in the film are pretty nondescript, the lead included,
although Thwaites seems to come alive in mischievous ways when he starts
to take care of a fussy newborn who can't stop crying at night. Holmes
and Skarsgård are both strange and unplaceable, playing human beings
whose emotions are entirely truncated. "Precision of language, please,"
says Mother at the dinner table when one of her children starts to
speak. Bridges galumphs across the screen, a madman out of Melville,
tormented, lonely, in and out of reality. His memories sometimes flatten
him. There is one moment where he tells Jonas what the word is for the
"feeling between people," and his eyes burn with pain and loss as he
says, "Love. It's called love." It's the only powerful moment in the
film. His emotion is so palpable it reaches off the screen and grips
your throat.
The use of heavy explanatory voiceover to open and close the film is
disappointing, especially since a couple of lines have been added to the
famous last paragraph of the book. Not surprisingly, the lines added
remove it from the moody ambiguous statement of hope that it is in the
book, and turn it into a complete platitude. We've heard it a hundred
times before. It emanates Sameness with every word.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
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