It happens, sometimes critics are just flat-out wrong on a film. It’s rare, and it doesn’t happen a lot (sorry, but most movies they pan really do suck), but you can set your watch to the kind of movie it will happen to: it is almost always a mid-budget movie with some serious ambition that critics can say it “didn’t deliver on.” It usually stars big enough actors that critics can feel safe in picking on it, but there’s some serious boundary to it achieving popular success so that way they don’t look too snotty. [Perhaps it’s a three hour time shifting opus like “Cloud Atlas” or maybe even a mostly black and white adaptation of a serious-minded children’s book like “The Giver,” written decades before dystopian novels were in vogue.]
Right now, The Giver is clocking a sorry 31 percent fresh rating on rotten tomatoes…four percentage points lower than The Expendables 3 and only a third of what Guardians of the Galaxy scored. You can argue about whether or not The Giver is successful in its goals, but on what planet is a film that is at least attempting to get at thought provoking questions not better than the limited ambitions of Stallone and co.? The Giver brings up real questions of human nature, cozy fascism vs. messy freedom, and the value of pain in appreciating pleasure, yet is somehow worse than a movie featuring Ronda Rousey as its best actor?
What Works: Like all American high school students, I was forced to read The Giver in 7th or 8th grade English class, but I truly can’t remember it very well. So I was judging this adaptation less on being an adaptation of a book most people were too young to remember clearly, and more as a standalone contemporary work that launched the genre that made shallower spectacles like Hunger Games and Divergent possible.
And on those terms, I enjoyed it. The black and white cinematography is beautiful, the vibrant “memories” are pulsating with life, and Jeff Bridges delivers as the ambiguous title character. And are there better actors out there to play creepy sheep than the sly Alexander Skarsgaard and the vacant Katie Holmes? Plus, the lead actor looks like he could play one of Mitt Romney’s sons, and that gave the movie (for me) a subtly perverse kick.
What Doesn’t: Clearly, a lot of people aren’t responding to this film for whatever reason. I feel like it’s out of misplaced reverence for the source material—-which I do remember as excellent, but foggy—-and might have been ready to pan anything called “The Giver.” They’ve also critiqued how subdued the film is, but I actually appreciated the lack of over dramatics and unnecessary cranked-up theatrics. Not to mention that those things would have been a big divergence from the book too.
What I Would Have Done Differently: This adaptation has been trying to get off the ground for years. I’m grateful we’ve finally gotten to experience it, and maybe one day other critics will be too. For now, the most important critics may be the grateful 7th graders who will probably get two class days to watch this movie instead of writing papers.
I really like what you had to say about this book that school children read and now a movie!