In a future where war has been abolished by means of the mandatory daily pharmacological erasing of emotions, infants are raised by the state to specific physical and mental criteria, or eliminated (lethal injection if they fail to measure up), and then assigned to family units of two parents and another sibling, living in planned communities that frighteningly resemble Irvine, CA. Differences are not allowed. Everyone dresses the same, thinks the same. At the age of 18 all children are assigned their occupations at a graduation ceremony based on careful evaluation of their aptitudes during their childhood. Jonas is not assigned to an occupation, rather, since he demonstrated aptitude for all of the categories, he is assigned the singular position of Receiver and assigned to the Giver for instruction.
IMDB Storyline:
The Giver, played by Jeff Bridges, holds all of the memories of the past. He feels that their society needs once again to experience the full range of human emotion in spite of the pain and societal messiness sometimes involved. Jonas, his student/protege, played by Brenton Thwaites, is the vehicle for this transition. The Chief Elder, played by Meryl Streep, is bound by tradition to maintain the status quo. As Jonas awakens to reality, conflicts arise.
Variety was much less charitable in its somewhat snarky review. Here's their bit, which I snip before it gets into the spoilers:
Although set in a genre that has had many past literary workouts, I thought it was a pretty decent flick, albeit maybe not the most memorable. I give it a 7.9 rating. IMDB gives it a 6.9. I think the Cass readers will probably glean more from the film than mainstream moviegoers. The book might be on my future reading list.
IMDB Storyline:
This film, based on Lois Lowry's book, tells the story of a perfect world. Everyone here is happy. When Jonas is 18 years old, he's chosen to be the community's Receiver of Memories. He enters into training with an old man called The Giver. From the Giver, Jonas learns about pain, sadness, war, and all the unhappy truths of the "real" world. He quickly realizes that his community is fake. Confronted with this reality, Jonas faces difficult choices about his own life and his future.
The Giver, played by Jeff Bridges, holds all of the memories of the past. He feels that their society needs once again to experience the full range of human emotion in spite of the pain and societal messiness sometimes involved. Jonas, his student/protege, played by Brenton Thwaites, is the vehicle for this transition. The Chief Elder, played by Meryl Streep, is bound by tradition to maintain the status quo. As Jonas awakens to reality, conflicts arise.
Variety was much less charitable in its somewhat snarky review. Here's their bit, which I snip before it gets into the spoilers:
Originally published in 1993 (six years before “The Matrix”), Lowry’s novel was itself a patchwork of ideas borrowed from Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Jack Finney and Ray Bradbury in its depiction of totalitarian groupthink masquerading as peaceable utopia. The setting was an unnamed anywhere known only as “the community,” whose residents had achieved a post-Platonic, post-Marxist ideal of a classless, conflict-free (and, though not explicitly stated, seemingly race-free) society through the chemical suppression of emotion and the erasure of all suspect stimuli (including books, colors, weather, and sex) from the historical record. Exempt from this rigorous burning of the past was one man: the Receiver of Memory, a grizzled community elder charged with keeping all human experience from time immemorial catalogued inside his own understandably addled brain.
If Lowry’s ideas weren’t anything new to genre buffs or sociology majors, what made her book so compulsively readable was the lucid simplicity of its prose and the surprising complexity of its arguments (especially for a novel aimed at children). Unlike a lot of speculative fiction, “The Giver” wasn’t a cautionary tale about nuclear or environmental apocalypse, but rather an envisaging of the even greater horror show we might effect through our ostensibly best impulses: to rid society of war, famine and other forms of suffering. It was a highly adaptable metaphor for any form of organized rhetoric, be it that of the religious right or the bleeding-heart left. And, taking a page from J.D. Salinger, Lowry didn’t just suggest that most adults were duplicitous phonies, but that they were capable of secretly murdering babies and the elderly without batting an eye. (Little wonder that “The Giver” was said to be banned from almost as many schools as made it compulsory reading.)
_http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-the-giver-1201280654/
Although set in a genre that has had many past literary workouts, I thought it was a pretty decent flick, albeit maybe not the most memorable. I give it a 7.9 rating. IMDB gives it a 6.9. I think the Cass readers will probably glean more from the film than mainstream moviegoers. The book might be on my future reading list.