This is Where I Leave You

Shawn Levy’s This is Where I Leave You is an Altman movie. The Jewish family who reunites for the father’s shiva is named Altman. Moreover, like so many Robert Altman films this one uses a cultural institution to expose harsh truths about the current American social climate. It also includes such signature elements as off-the-wall dialogue, often black comic or profane, with a collection of nutbar characters airing barely concealed animosities, with overlapping dialogue and colliding egos.   

Like a Robert Altman film this one subverts its genre. It turns into an anti-RomCom. Normally the splintered courtships recover into marriage, with friendships restored, family ties strengthened. But here the film ends with two marriages broken, one threatened but restored, one affair broken and another perhaps to begin, and the lonely widow turning to a lesbian love. And the nice brother steals his kid brother’s Porsche. Levy’s lesson is Altmanic — the American promise of success and happiness is a delusion, which the Hollywood dream factory exists to confirm, and that only a maverick has the clear vision and irreverence to expose. (Hence Argo is rewarded for briefly helping the nation forget its incompetence and failure with Iran.) 

Here perhaps two outside figures provide the emblems for the main ones. One is the little boy exuberantly learning to use his potty. He embodies a life-changing moment, a turning point into a new level of maturity. The only adult who finds such joy in transition is Momma Hilary (Jane Fonda), whose candid memories of her marital sex life are only trumped by her revelation of a lesbian affair. Her children get only pain and grief at their turning points: Judd (Jason Bateman) finding his wife in bed with his boss, then learning she’s carrying his own baby girl; the puerile Phillip (Adam Driver) in an affair with an older, wiser woman, Tracey (Connie Britton), but losing her when he can’t resist a side dish; Paul (Corey Stoll) whose insecurity swells into jealous rage when he can’t impregnate his wife and risks losing control of the family sporting goods store. 

Sister Wendy (Tina Fey) has the maturing little son but is at the point of losing her semidetached husband. Worse, she still harbours a passion for her girlhood love Horry (Timothy Olyphant), whom she left behind when their car accident left him brain damaged. (When's the last time brain damage and its emotional consequences cropped up in an American RomCom?) If the little boy is an emblem of people moving on to new stages of life, Horry embodies stasis, being stuck in the moment unable to advance. His saving grace is that alone among his generation here he accepts his situation without resentment. Similarly, Hilary after reminiscing about her husband's humongous cock finds new bliss with the neighbour's little clitoris. 

The character who most obviously grows is Judd, who accepts both his wife’s desertion and responsibility for their child. He also resolves to live a more complicated life, in search of a more real relationship, presumably with the ice skater who had a childhood crush on him. As in Egoyan’s The Captive (see separate blog) the ice-skating heroine personifies the solitary search for grace in a harsh, cold hard-surfaced world.   

Apt for a therapeutic anti-film, there are two therapists here, both mature blonde women (post-Freudian?). Hilary wrote a bestseller about family relationships (of the physician heal thyself syndrome). Her female sensitivity and sense provided the royalties that enabled the men’s world, the sporting goods store, to survive. Tracey was Phillip’s therapist until they fell in love, a relationship she was the only adult not to see was doomed from the getgo. Tracey emerges reduced by the whole experience, Hilary enhanced not just  by her uplifting surgery but by her openness to a new form of love. Her shiva ploy sustains her family as her royalties did the store. 

This Altman family is wholly secular, so that the mother’s assertion of shiva comes from the spot where they used to put the Christmas tree. Still, the ritual gathering serves to remind the grievers of their bond, engages their community, and provides a ceremony that helps them get through both the loss of their father and their mutual antagonisms. “Boner” Grodner, the childhood friend turned rabbi, is a caricature of the new-style with-it “modern” rabbi who’s so detached from the traditional that his funeral prayer comes from The New Testamant. That’s his, not the film’s, goof. Perhaps the title draws more clearly on Jewish understanding. Lech lechah. God doesn’t like leaving but He approves becoming. Here the healthy characters find ways to be always becoming something more. That's what life's turning points are all about, from potty training to widowhood and all the disappointments, challenges and losses in between: at each point you leave your former self and advance. Or not.

The Drop

There are four main metaphors in Michael Roskam’s The Drop.

1. The title refers to the illicit laundering of underworld money through a bar. It’s how the gang gathers its receipts in a safe secret manner. That makes it a temptation for a robbery, by gunsels stupid enough to take on the Chechnya mafia. But the swaggering characters are also dropped, whether the hapless stooge robbers, the looney sadist Eric Deeds or quiet Cousin Marv, whose unwise ambitions would restore him to his delusions of lost significance. All the fallen bear their scars, though dog Rocco recovers more fully than the so human Nadia. When he’s dropped Deeds learns his street cred was based on Bob’s deed not his.

2. But there can be salvation. In contrast to the fallen, Nadia and Rocco rise from their falls and find redemption, new lives, thanks to the good nature of the — wholly unprepossessing — Bob, whom as the detective finally notes, nobody sees coming. The simplest character proves the most effective, even if he is a faithful Catholic who feels unworthy of communion. He brings others salvation because he expects none himself. The pit bull can survive his abuse — and his breed’s reputation — if someone gives him the chance. Slow Bob does. Bob Saganowski is like a Charles (Buchinski) Bronson hero — under sedation.

3. The opening shot shows the city night reflected in a sidewalk pool. As in Taxi Driver, the image is infernal, providing a reverse view of normalcy. We get similar reversals from the bottom of the barrel collecting the illicit money and from shots of the nefarious lives. The drama reveals the underbelly of our daylight lives.

4. As in that Hell some characters represent Death in Life, the living dead. Literally, Marv’s dad is in an expensive home wired for a vegetable survival. Figuratively, Marv himself feels dead because his life lacks the importance and self-respect he thinks he used to have. In trying to recover his illusory past he burns whatever future he might have had. Nadia retreats from the brutality of her earlier relationship into a wary detachment. She won’t let Bob into her yard till she’s sent photos of his driver’s license to four friends. As if she has any. Her real danger enters and holds without difficulty.  

As Cousin Marv is James Gandolfini’s valedictory role there’s also the counterpoint: Life in Death. The film marks the afterlife of Gandolfini’s persona. His Soprano image enlivens Bob’s recollection of the crew he and Marv had as young men and Marv’s memories of power:"I had something once. I was respected. I was FEARED." (Gandolfini provided a similar frisson of memory in the Broadway production of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage.) Though we don't know Tony’s fate we’re shown one possibility when we see Marv’s. Gandolfini is gone but his persona has been freed. 
     With a marvellous script by Dennis Lehane and excellent performances, this is a truly poetic tour of those mean streets down which a man must go. Especially in the Chechins’ Brooklyn. 

The Captive

Captive is Atom Egoyan’s most accessible, riveting film, so most reviewers dumped all over it. Unjustly. It’s a superb analysis of the tensions and effects of a young girl’s abduction and captivity. This is a thriller with rare intelligence and subtlety. Of Egoyan we can expect no less.

In the opening credits the words appear in black against a cold snowbank, then vanish into thin air. Both points encapsulate the story: a girl disappears, then a policewoman, in a world that is harsh and frigid.

The narrative unfolds in fragments. The first scenes shift between characters of unclear identity and connection. Throughout, the film leaps ahead and back in time. Still, it grows easier to follow as we attend to it. The shifts require our more active engagement. That’s important because a lurid fascination with story-telling is as central a concern here as pedophilic pornography. Their common element is sadistic vicariousness.

The film’s structure reflects in its central emblem, the jigsaw puzzle that a cop uses to demonstrate his “visual pattern recognition,” as he reads the whole image out of a random scattering of the puzzle pieces. That phrase resonates. Detective Jeffrey misreads the pattern of visible evidence when he concludes the girl’s father, Matthew, a broke landscaper with an assault conviction, has sold her to a kiddie-porn ring. The mother Tina misreads it by persisting in blaming Matthew for his momentary neglect. 

Thus the girl is not the only captive. Her parents are by the father’s guilt and suspicion and by the mother’s heartbreak and unforgiving rage. Jeffrey is captive to his prejudices and Nicole is briefly imprisoned herself. The creep villain Mika is himself subject to his own perversity, as its captive. But he remains a villain, even when coerced by his jailed cousin to abduct policewoman Nicole to record her memories of sordid suffering.

Mika is an inadequate construction manager working for his mentor's development company. For all his impressive resources in his home and the lavish secured cell Mika is less a developer than a case of arrested development. Still, he encourages his prisoner's efforts in music and composition. In both positive and negative ways, he develops her. Typical of an Egoyan film, the villain mobilizes an array of closed circuit video, so the girl can watch her mother unawares as she cleans her hotel rooms and finds planted reminders of her lost little girl. The videos are again a technological connection but with dehumanizing detachment.

The same play between connection and cold distance works in the storytelling, whether Nicole’s from her prison van or the girl’s. Cassandra saves herself by trapping Mika with another story. Eight years after her abduction she has outgrown her sexual appeal to him. But the porn ring uses her to lure other young girls into their control. She's their "Gateway." Her present hold on him is to tell stories about her childhood, as he’s excited by her suffering. Cassandra’s name recalls the Greek prophetess cursed with being disbelieved. Our Cassandra is more like Scheherazade, staying alive by telling stories, here about her past duress not the future. She saves herself by asking Mika to have an interview taped with her childhood ice-skating dance partner. But first she reminds her father of that boy’s pledge to take no other partner. So he catches the tail-end of the interview and tracks down the creep. She is saved by her father’s and that boy’s constancy. 

The plot is set in Niagara Falls, Ontario, with Detective Jeffrey just transferring from St. Catharines. The latter is the town that was traumatized by the the couple Paul Bernardo and Carla Homolka, who abducted, raped and even killed young girls, including Carla's kid sister. This fiction draws on that awful reality. 

The characters provide some rich moments. The father’s temper is destructive but it speaks to his commitment. When Tina sees Cassie’s face in a TV shot she beams with serene pleasure. But the enormity of the girl’s predicament sinks in, as Tina talks to Matthew on the cellphone. Her radiance crumbles. The last shot, after the family’s three-sided reunion, shows Cassie skating freely into an open rink, free at last, as confident of her unseen partner’s eight-year-old pledge as of her father’s perseverance. 

Of the two main cops Nicole shows a superior integrity over Jeffrey’s pragmatism. She’s appalled by his rough methods and even more when he uses his niece as bait to catch Mika. There are a couple of jarring notes in their presentation. One, they have an affair. Two, to a fundraising dinner at which Nicole is the keynote speaker on the subject of pedapihilic abuse she wears a sensational red gown with the front hitched up above her knees. The gown’s contrast to her police uniform photo on the posters suggests her fullness as a character. Her womanhood extends beyond her official function. Like her affair, her sexy gown shows a normal sexuality that has survived her professional exposure to the criminal perverse. At the same time, that front hitch suggests a vulnerability, setting up her abduction and captivity. The hitch looks like another gateway.

This film is about child pornography, with its web of secrecy and the complicitous engagement of respectable businessmen, the church, politicos and police. Hence Mika's sinister boss and his evasive wife. While Egoyan includes that awareness he’s careful to focus on the family who share the girl’s suffering and he scrupulously omits the lurid. From the Enquirer headlines he pulls a touchingly human story.

The Double -- CALL Discussion Notes

Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) is a nebbish living an invisible life at work, where he is a low level bureaucrat. He is ignored by his dream girl Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), scorned even by his mother (Phyllis Somerville), and alienated from everyone and everything. Even machinery torments him, The company boss is a mysterious power named The Colonel (James Fox). A new colleague James Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) looks exactly like Simon but is his complete opposite: confident, popular, effective, admired, crooked. He starts to take over Simon’s life. James impresses superviser Popadopoulos (Wallace Shawn) with Simon’s ideas, seduces Hannah, P’s intern niece and the waitress, and steals his apartment. He even displaces him at Simon’s mother’s funeral. Waking up from a head bash, near an empty grave, Simon is ready to take control of his life by ending it.

Consider the following questions:

1. Why doesn’t anyone else notice the two men’s physical resemblance?
2. One might say the film is about “regression analysis.” How?
3. “I dunno my Dostoevsky but this sure feels like a Kafkaesque comedy to me.” Discuss.
4. To put it another way, the inflection of reality throughout makes it seem like a dream. How do the events or processes that happen reflect upon our reality? e.g., Could it be about things like self-defeat, self-projection, etc.? Could its undertaking be our psychological rather than our physical reality?
5. What’s the point of the two main characters’ names? Plus the palindromic Hannah? 
6. Consider the narrative’s frame. The first shot is a closeup of Simon’s face in the lateral moving train. The last is in the ambulance when he’s lying presumably dead but fantasizing Hannah’s and The Colonel’s regard, again moving sideways. His fatal fall starts with his face in closeup, now dropping. 
7. What’s the point of the first suicide? 
8. Lonely Hannah makes sanguine drawings/collages, which she rips up, tosses, and Simon collects. What’s the point? The one we see most clearly is her Magrittean image, where we see the back of her head, which she also sees in the mirror in front of her.
9. How is the film possibly coloured by what we know of the director? (Director Richard Ayoade is a Norwegian-Nigerian born in London, who studied law at Cambridge where he was president of the musical comedy drama club. He is best known in Britain as a comic actor. In his previous feature, Submarine (2010), based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne, the 15-year-old hero aspires to break up his mother’s resumed affair and to lose his virginity before he turns 16.
10. How are we helped by the director’s explanation of this film: “Darth Vader is within all of us. And I remember that every time I shower.” 
11. What’s the metaphor in Simon in his apartment watching Hannah through a telescope? In Hannah being a “copyist”?
12. What’s the film’s colour scheme? The set design? The music?
13. I gather Dostoyevsky’s “Simon” goes insane at the end and sees his double everywhere. Why the difference here?
14. In the opening train scene a man complains Simon is in his place, in an empty car. What’s the point? The man’s paper, The Daily Page, is headlined “COLLAPSE.”
15. As this film follows Enemy, are we in some kind of doppelgänger season? Why?
16. What does the factory make/do? So?
17. Why are all Simon's drinks blue?
18. What’s the point in the factory guard turning up as the hospital nurse?
19. What’s the point of the TV clips? How do they reflect upon the kind of film we're watching?
20. Does Simon die at the end or does he survive? Does he kill his double or realize himself by incorporating some of his Shadow side?
21. What are the implications of casting the one black actor as both the security guard and the doctor?

What is the significance of the following quotes:

1.”Nothing personal, mate, but you’re pretty unnoticeable. Bit of a non-person really." 

2. James: ”leave her wanting more." Simon: ”I just don't know if it is me”. "That's why it’s so good.” 

3. ”How can we get caught? We have the same face.”

4. “I don't know how to be myself. It's like I'm permanently outside myself. Like, like you could push your hands straight through me if you wanted to. And I can see the type of man I want to be versus the type of man I actually am and I know that I'm doing it but I'm incapable of what needs to be done. I'm like Pinocchio, a wooden boy. Not a real boy. And it kills me.”

5. “I have all these things that I want to say to her, like... Like how I can tell she's a lonely person, even if other people can't. Cause I know what it feels like to be lost and lonely and invisible.”

6. James: You can't be doing anything gay. No ice-cream cones.

Simon: I like ice cream.

James: Of course. It's delicious. Ice cream is fine in a cup, but in a cone is gay unless you're with a woman at the time.

Simon: Anything else?

James: No riding on a motorcycle with another man. Exceptions are drive-by shootings, bomb throwings and purse snatchings. Anything else is gay.

Simon: You seem to know a lot about this.

James: Defense wins championships.

7. It's terrible to be alone too much.

8. You don't exist anymore.

Simon: Excuse me?

Workers' Services Executive: You're no longer in the system.

Simon: Well, just put me back in the system.

Workers' Services Executive: I can't put you back in the system.

Simon: Why?

Workers' Services Executive: Because you don't exist. I can't put someone who doesn't exist in the system.

Simon: But I used to be in the system.

Workers' Services Executive: Not according to the system. In fact, according to the system, you've never existed.

Simon: How reliable is the system?

Workers' Services Executive: Hey, it's completely reliable.

Simon: Yes, but I used to exist. I do exist! I'm standing in this room, aren't I?

Workers' Services Executive: And?

Simon: So how do I get back in the system?

Workers' Services Executive: You need a card.

Simon: Right. So can I please get a new card?

Workers' Services Executive: No.

Simon: Why?

Workers' Services Executive: Because you're not in the system.

9. Mr. Papadopoulos: Simon, give Rudolph his arm back!

 10.Simon: I don't want to be a boy held up by string.

11. James: I would tear the asshole off an elephant for a piece of trim I wanted that bad.

12. “Put him down as a maybe.”

13.The Colonel There aren't too many like you. Are there Simon?

Simon: I'd like to think I'm pretty unique.

The Trip to Italy

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Italy advances his meditation on the — ostensible — maturing of modern males, begun with his actors/characters Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip (2010). Both films provide the initial charm of putting us in the company of very bright, witty men as they cruise through beautiful landscapes and enjoy gourmet restaurant meals. Despite the air of improvisation, however, these are structured, very serious films. 

Perhaps this one’s key theme is suggested in the recurring references to Fellini’s Le Dolce Vita. The men seem to be living “the sweet life.”   But as the woman photographer reminds us, that film purported to be about the glamour of Rome but was in fact an exposure of the shallowness of its characters. So is this.

As in the first film Rob and Steve seem to live through the films and TV shows they’ve seen. Rob is only authoritative and confident when he does his Michael Parkinson. Otherwise he sinks into Hugh Grant. Their comic strength in variously successful impersonations is actually their weakness as human beings. Their constant flow of impersonations suggests an inability or reluctance to speak as themselves, to reveal anything sincere or meaningful. Their conversations are all technique, no content. It's left to their pregnant assistant to draw life lessons from the movies they cite. In both her critical intelligence and pregnancy she represents a  maturity, fertility and fullness all the men lack. Rob tells her of his infidelity as if he needs her approval or criticism. She won't oblige. 

Moreover, for all the beauty of the settings and the charm of the food they only speak in film references. They seem unable to experience anything directly and intensely. Even Rob’s dream is a replay of the Godfather II revenge assassination. 

They hardly ever talk about their spectacular meals. This is surprising since their commission is to review the restaurants for (cue: another reference to vicarious living) The Observer. Moreover, their entire experience is restricted to luxury hotels and restaurants. That puts them into an impersonation of life. They live in a film and their life experiences are filtered through — i.e., restricted by — their vocabulary of films. Perhaps the petrified Vesuvian figures are their emblem, once living beings now frozen into a box/sculpture/film. 

In a typically resonant scene, when Rob’s wife is too busy to hear his news about his Hollywood film job — a Michael Mann-ly film! — he petulantly retreats into an ever-boyish Dustin Hoffman act. He then implicitly decides to resume his affair with the blonde deckhand. We see the realization of his first night with the woman, but only infer Steve’s resurrection with the photographer. The fling is more meaningful to the adulterous manchild Rob than to the older, divorced Steve.

That contrast runs through the film. Where Steve empathetically wonders about the human behind the petrified corpse, Rob turns it into a foil for a comic routine, using it to score points off Steve. Rob is the more free-wheeling and antic, Steve generally more tense and subdued. The new ending is a marked advance on the first film’s. There Steve returned to his posh, ultra-modern flat and seemed sapped by its vacuity. Here Steve brings over his bored teenage son, spends time with him, then announces he is selling his flat to buy a house near his ex’s, so his son will more easily come visit or even live with him. Steve is growing up.

One reason is both men’s growing sense of their mortality. In the first film they played at roguish blades. Here they’re aware the young beauties don’t see them anymore. Their Batman Caine, Bond and Brando impersonations echo aging, death and decay. Hence their graveyard scenes, especially the tombs of the ex-pat Brits and the long dead Romantics. Special attention is paid the freest-wheeling, Byron, whose near-acronym name is only a taunt to Brydon and his life. There is even an implication of sexual defensiveness and dread in their running line of homosexual jokes. They have no other way to express their mutual affection than by ritual insult.  

     In this series the broadly talented Winterbottom directs two very good actors as men whose media-ted lives have detached them from genuine experience and intimate relationships. As usual, the road trip dramatizes the heroes’ psychological journey. Steve advances; Rob is still running on the spot, though heavier. 

King Lear -- Stratford, Ontario, 2014

I think it was G. Wilson Knight who first pointed out that the Fool and Cordelia are never on stage together. They may have been played by the same actor. The Fool disappears in the storm scene. It’s an ill wind. He’s made redundant when Lear starts spouting the Fool’s kind of mad compulsive wisdom. Knight’s point is that when Lear, cradling Cordelia’s corpse, says “My poor fool is hanged,” he speaks from a higher understanding, perceiving the actor behind the role. 

It’s the birth of meta-theatre. It's a reminder that Shakespeare is still ahead of our avant garde and our theoreticians. Not that it didn’t happen before. When Thomas Nashe wrote Somer’s Last Will and Testament his speaker was both the season and the actor, Will Somers. In Elizabethan theatre prologues and epilogues often flirted with the boundary between actor and character. But out of such a casual frisson Shakespeare fashioned a major theme.

I didn’t realize — or as embarrassing, have forgotten — how many other times this happens in King Lear. Blind Gloucester remembers that the first time he saw mad Tom, he thought of his banished son Edgar (who was playing Tom). The post-mad Lear sees Kent in the servant Caius, whom he hadn’t recognized before. In a comic replay, the Fool pretends to see Lear’s vision of a daughter: “Cry you mercy, I took thee for a joint stool.” He sees only the “actor” stool  but now playfully pretends to see beyond to the imagined character. The rejected Cordelia’s suitors split on this: one sees the character beneath her new role of shame, but the other is stuck on her apparent reduction. There’s even a reversal. When Edgar in disguise refers to Gloucester with the generic honorific “father” Edgar’s role-playing conceals the fact he is indeed addressing his father. In these instances we are aware of our actor playing a character who is playing another role.

The awareness of the actor within the role parallels the layers of physical reality in the Edgar-Gloucester scene at Dover. As Peter Brook contended, the physical setting works on several layers simultaneously. The basic level is the stage floorboards. But that floor plays the role of the British landscape where the drama unfolds. On a third level Edgar as Tom persuades blind Gloucester that they are climbing to a cliff at Dover. The fourth is when Edgar as local rustic persuades Gloucester he has fallen a dramatic distance to a lower plane, and has been miraculously preserved. For all the imaginative overlays the basic reality — the “actor” — remains the unaccommodated floorboards. 

This device points to one of the play’s major themes. The wide range of roles individuals play — along whatever spectra of authority, power, wealth, station, favour, etc. — are but superficial overlays on the essential human, the bare forked animal, unaccommodated man. From this springs director Antoni Cimolino’s take on the play. He finds a contemporary compulsion in the play’s alertness to the predicament of the Toms whom Lear first encounters here: the homeless, the abandoned, the afflicted. He realizes: “I have ta’en/ Too little care of this.” When Gloucester gives his disowned son Edgar (as Tom) his purse he says “distribution should undo excess/And each man have enough.” 

With those prompts in the text Cimolino adds a new framework to the play. In a dumbshow before the first scene a few ragged peasants scuttle about the stage, one warms at a fire behind, two curl up for a cold sleep. When the play opens at the court, the royalty appear in the context of the neglected underclass. Lear’s ensuing division of his kingdom among his daughters seems a trivial Upstairs to the radical Downstairs of the kingdom’s division between royal Haves and peasant Have Nots. The peasants make a few silent appearances thereafter. In the last scene one puts his hand on the new king’s shoulder, both bracing him and reminding him of his responsibility for his lesser subjects. To the play’s compelling vision of the human condition Cimolino adds the — neither redundant nor insignificant — reminder to neglectful governments, whether America’s Tea Party, the Canadian and British Tories or the abundant Putins.

To this powerful production I had only two troubled responses. One was playing Kent/Caius as a younger man than the  references to his white beard would direct. The older man’s abuse in the stocks would set up the harsher treatment of Lear and Gloucester, as his physical strength would prepare us for Lear’s despatch of Cordelia’s hangman. An older Kent would more sensibly be preparing to follow his old master, as by implication the older Fool already did.

My second reservation was the spectacular storm opening after the interval. The fact that Stratford can stage a thundering realistic storm doesn’t mean it should. Indeed, given the play’s faith in reimagining the physical stage in the Dover scene, one might have trusted the poetry and the performance to convey the storm without all that thunder and smokescreen. Especially as the returning audience has to shift back into the poetry gear, drowning out the language in the noise and the performance in the smoke was unproductive. Some very pertinent passages were lost. Even the loud Lear was more dinned against than dinning.
     Though not as brilliantly nuanced as his Merchant of Venice last year (see my blog), Cimolino’s King Lear was still a remarkable, moving experience.

The Giver

     In both Lois Lowry’s book and Phillip Noyce’s movie, The Giver pulls a dystopian world view out of a basic adolescent frustration. Jonas and Fiona discover first stirrings of love — but any physical demonstration, or even the use of the word, not to mention respect for the emotion, is severely forbidden by the adult world. As any teen would understand, the grownups have forgotten what love means. 

That grey world is bereft of emotions, memories and humanity. Hence the film’s palette from the 40s, film grise. Jonas’s original assignment is — as Receiver — to receive the race’s memories from the Giver. In the latter role Jeff Bridges is the depository of all experience and wisdom — in other words, the Anti-Dude, a reversal of his persona. But when he spurs his young charge to break his fetters and the restraints that oppress the entire society, the Dude rises again. 

The film’s broader statement is our loss of humanity when we try to reduce life to the safe and the neutered. Without pain, grief, war, we miss the positive extensions of love and faith and hope. In the film’s ultimate endorsement of adolescent solipsism, Jonas has only to sled through a vaporous barrier and he will restore the entire community’s lost collective memory, recovering their lost emotional spectrum. One sentient kid can save mankind. This is Footloose on steroids. Rather than the teen having to bend to the world's will, the world here bends to his. No wonder this is such a popular YA narrative.

Fiona’s professional touch with infants and Jonas’s commitment to baby (angel) Gabriel contrast to all the other characters’ unfeeling treatment of babies. The heroes’ instincts emphasize the unnaturalness of the system (which derives from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, inter alia). Gabriel’s name echoes his Biblical forbear who heralded the new kingdom. His extraordinary patience through the arduous wintry trek suggests he already senses the seriousness of his mission, so he’s not going to act up. A worthy model for every infant seated behind me on any flight.

As the society’s head Meryl Streep’s capacity to teleport herself anywhere and to materialize and dematerialize there at will has the incidental effect of embodying the insubstantiality of her power and principles. In contrast, the Giver can rematerialize a scene from his past while remaining tangibly present. His powerful memory trumps her power of willful amnesia.
     The title suggests the Bridges character is the central one. No, it’s still Receiver Jonas, who grows into the title mantle when — after receiving the Giver’s range of instruction  — he breaks out to become a Giver himself, before his time. He gives Gabriel back his life, Fiona her first intimation of emotion, and his society their hearts and minds back.