Book and Movie Review: Divergent

Divergent (Book: 2011; Movie: 2014)

Book: Four Stars out of Five

Author: Virginia Roth

Movie: Three Stars out of Five

             Director: Neil Burger

             Screenplay: Evan Daugherty, Vanessa Taylor

It is always a pleasure for me to compare an author’s vision for her book to that of the director’s and screenwriters’ version in a movie. The easiest comparison is a case such as Cloud Atlas where both the movie and the book were brilliant. Even more enjoyable are those few cases where a dreadful book is turned into a work of genius; my favorite example of this is The Bridges of Madison County. Unfortunately the most common transition is from a very good book being turned into something quite mediocre. This is what has happened in the case of Virginia Roth’s Divergent.

Roth has created in her 2011 book, “Divergent” a compelling story that is well crafted technically and thematically. Following a current trend in Young Adult fiction, Roth has placed her story of sixteen year old Beatrice Prior in a post-apocalyptic vision of the future. By means only vaguely described, humanity has separated into five factions; the five factions represent five strengths found in Human nature: kindness (Amity faction), truthfulness (Candor), selflessness (Abnegation), intelligence (Erudite), and bravery (Dauntless). The unlikelihood that Humanity could so separate by either sociological or biological means following a devastating  war is somewhat beside the point in this novel as the separation provides Roth with opportunities to explore the strengths and weaknesses of each behavioral trait. One point she makes via a good use of foreshadowing is that each faction felt that the cause of the war was an insufficiency of their particular’s faction’s strength in those that waged the war. The seeds of factional distrust are there to be readily seen; so much so, one wonders how the separation into factions was ever thought to be a good idea.

The story follows Beatrice, now renamed Tris after she has left her childhood faction of Abnegation to join and train with Dauntless. That she finds and falls in love with a young man (known as Four) should come as no surprise to the reader; or that while she is initially the lowest ranked of the new initiates into the Dauntless ranks, that by training’s end, she is the highest ranked. Like so many YA stories, the familiar traits of bravery, intelligence, and selflessness help Tris to stand out in the face of her physical limitations and a small coterie of bullies. Another frequent theme in YA fiction is the value of a loving family or the corrosive effects of a dysfunctional one. While Tris finds special strengths in the memories of her family, Four’s upbringing provides a stark contrast as his memories of a controlling and abusive father always loom in his thoughts and actions.

Four’s problems from his childhood are cleverly revealed to Tris and the reader via a plot device. This device or McGuffin is a chemically induced simulation of one’s deepest fears.  McGuffin or no, I actually enjoyed its use in both the book and the movie (its use was actually the technical highlight of an otherwise flawed movie). The simulations allow the reader to much better understand who Four is and how he came to be; it also allows Tris an opportunity to grow as a person as she experiences Four’s fears and to help him overcome them. It is a plot device, but it really helps to propel the story along in terms of both the story’s primary arc as well as to also help describe the budding romance between the main characters.

Having developed into a highly capable new member of Dauntless and to have publicly displayed her affection for Four, the story starts what will presumably be the initial stages of the concluding parts to Roth’s Divergent trilogy. On the morning following her graduation into the member ranks of Dauntless, Tris discovers that her new comrades are all behaving in a highly robotic manner. She blends in with them as she searches for Four. They do indeed find one another as well as the destination and intent of their robotic mates. As they further search for an explanation of the other Dauntless members behavior they learn of the secret plot and methods now being employed by one of the rival factions against Tris’ childhood faction. She seeks out her parents and brother in an attempt to warn them and by the book’s end, we find Tris, Four and the various survivors on their way into the hinterlands and book two of the trilogy.

For a debut effort, Roth has in her first year out of college constructed a very good novel. It is aimed at the YA readership but adults can certainly read it with enjoyment as well. Roth has invented an unlikely scenario with the five faction idea and then employed an equally unlikely plot device in the form of the serum used to induce what are essentially controlled and monitored hallucinations. However, I think that such scene settings and plot devices can be acceptable if they are used to good effect. In the case of the book Divergent, Roth has indeed used them to good effect. She explores very effectively the idea of personality strengths and deficits, but also how some personality traits though named and presumed different can in fact be very similar. Her primary example of how bravery in defense of another is really just another name for selflessness is one such example; presumably there will be more such examples in the succeeding books. Roth has shown how such discussions on behavior and their sociological outcomes can be both entertaining and enlightening.

Having praised the book, I turn now to the movie. It was, in short, a disappointment. One could compare it to its cinematic cousin, Mockingjay, Part 1 or to its literary antecedent, the book just discussed. In either comparison, the movie Divergent fails to deliver. The book’s strengths lie in the exploration of human strengths, primarily bravery and selflessness. To illustrate these themes the books delves deeply into the characters, their fears, their strengths, and their weaknesses. The book is able to demonstrate how and what Tris took from her childhood experiences with her mom and dad. Both the movie and the book show the fears that Tris carries as a young adult, but in the movie unlike the book, there is virtually no character definition made. The reader has a clear and firm grasp on where Tris is strong, where she is weak and to whom she must turn for help. But movie viewer is exposed to these fears more as hurdles for Tris to face and conquer; their relationship to her actual nature or to how they have shaped her is completely non-existent.

The movie does utilize the simulations of Tris’ fears very well from a cinematic/technical view. The fear simulations are well executed and create a great set of visual images. But like so many CGI images, they just don’t provide much more than eye candy. The performances of Tris by Shailene Woodley and of Four by Theo James are quite frankly of the same nature; both actors are very attractive, and reasonably proficient in their roles, but there just doesn't seem to be much more than their surface appearance. The director’s control and construction of each scene is perfectly fine, but somewhere between the translation from the book or from the screenplay to the screen, too much of the heart and soul from the book is lost. What’s left is little more than an outline of the ideas that the book presents, and the movie fails to follow up on.