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'The Giver':Take it or leave it

Filming Lois Lowry's popular novel about an emotionless society turns out to be problematic in the uninvolving "The Giver."

This image released by The Weinstein Company shows Meryl Streep, left, and Jeff Bridges in a scene from "The Giver." (AP Photo/ The Weinstein Company)
This image released by The Weinstein Company shows Meryl Streep, left, and Jeff Bridges in a scene from "The Giver." (AP Photo/ The Weinstein Company)Read moreAP
    by GARY THOMPSON
    Published 

"THE GIVER" is a bit of a dud on-screen, and we might have seen it coming - writing about an emotionless society is one thing, filming one is quite another.

The movie is drawn from Lois Lowry's popular and influential novel of tweens growing up in an authoritarian society where citizens take a daily injection of drugs to dull their feelings.

More disturbingly, leaders of the blandly named "Community" come up with Orwellian language to describe the actions they take to maintain rigid uniformity - troublesome infants and burdensome elderly are released and removed to "elsewhere" via lethal injection, shown in graphic detail in one particularly gruesome scene.

The society is run by a stoic council of elders (headed up by scowling Meryl Streep, with Joni Mitchell's hair), who purport to have their reasons for draining existence of its passion and empathy.

It is done to protect citizens from the excesses of human passion - a record of which is kept in the mind of a special elder (Jeff Bridges), whose job is to pass this dangerous but important knowledge along to Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), the young person selected to replace him.

This mind-meld process accounts for the movie's best passages - the community is a black-and-white world that bleeds and then explodes with color as Jonas absorbs and assimilates the staggering influx of emotional/historical information.

But, when Jonas is back at his monochrome home, with his parents (Katie Holmes, Alexander Skarsgard) and their sanded-down emotions, the movie becomes wooden and a bit ridiculous. (I couldn't help but wonder if Holmes was drawing on domestic life with ex-husband Tom Cruise.)

Bridges' Giver also introduces Jonas to music by showing him a hologram of a former pupil on the piano - it's Taylor Swift, in a disconcertingly small role.

Given the shackles that the story places on the range of the actors, it's also not surprising that there's little heat in the budding romance between Jonas and a formerly platonic friend (Odeya Rush).

Those who love the book will probably not love the amped-up action-fueled conclusion, but you understand why filmmakers wanted to give the flattened-out movie a jolt of energy. What energy there is comes from old pros Streep and Bridges, during their brief scenes together as adversaries.