"The Giver" Teaches What Humanity Has Forgotten: Life is a Grand and Grotesque mix of experiences both Joyful and Awful and efforts to flatten out the drama dehumanze all of us.
"The Giver" is more simple and raw than the rest of today's teen dystopias filled with overly complex backstories and tortured love triangles. (Author Lois Lowry published her novel in 1993, which makes it officially the nice but out-of-date aunt of Katniss and the Divergent crowd.)
The story picks up several generations after Armageddon when whumanity has done something so awful that the survivors have wiped it from memory along with a lot more. How to kiss, how to clap how to make love, how to endure pain and how to lie. Their climate-controlled mesa, one of several dozen eliminated disruptions/discomfort such as weather and animals.
To keep the peace, everyone's mood is controlled by medicating given in the morning as small doses of an unnamed compound are injected into a finger whose genetic code is scanned to be sure that everyone is kept happy. Sure, they've sacrificed the ability to see color — the better to eradicate racism — but at least there's no fear, no hate, no envy, no violence and no risk. SAMENESS is the fundamental value and "keeping it cool" is the primary virtue.
Those who do not fit (the terminally ill, the old, the hard to control) are "Released" to "Elsewhere". Translation: they are euthanized and disposed of "with dignity and kindness." Teenagers, of course, would hate it if they knew they were missing out on rebellion, dancing and lust. But they don't. They live by very simple rules, kept dosed supervised by ever present monitors, and assigned to their life's work in the same ceremony where the elderly are thanked for their lives and "retired."
Well, one does learn what they are all missing. Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), is learning what they've lost. He's been appointed the Keeper of Memories — the sage who uses the mistakes of the past to advise the leaders of the present — and his trainer, the outgoing Keeper (Jeff Bridges) who is now the Giver of Memories, and who is harged with filling him in on the good and bad of what mankind has lost: crowd-surfing and Tiananmen Square and polar bears and Nelson Mandela raising a fist and Vietnam and the poaching of elephants.
Director Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games) leans heavily on montages, provided from the greatest documentary archives, that are really very moving and quite beautiful and then cuts to Jonas filled with joy and laugher, or startled and amazed, or heavy with the weight of what he's just learned. He has discovered what being human really is.
He furtively cuts back on his meds and the film represents his awakening by slowly saturating from black-and-white to pale pastels to the full, rich rainbow of life, including the auburn hair that graces the childhood friend (Odeya Rush). It is in this transformation that he now realizes he loves- a word his caretaker/"mother", played by Katie Holmes, sniffs is "so antiquated it no longer makes sense."
What's Jonas going to do about his hermetically sealed community? The Giver has a plan. The Giver's own "daughter" (who is not really his daughter because "families" raise the children selected for them from birth mothers), failed to accept the memories and was eventually "released." The Giver has a way to restore the humanity to all but he needed the right agent to make it work. Enter Jonas.
I won't say any more. The town elder's (Meryl Streep) caution that "when people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong every single time." has a lot of truth to it, even in the way that the film (and the book before it) "solves" the problem.
But for those who choose to buy tickets to The Giver, an imperfect but straightforward charmer with a powerful message that respects their intelligence, the time will be well spent.
P.S. Reviewers dislike the film with only 31 percent of the 106 reviewer at Rotten Tomatoes giving it a Thumbs Up. But 71 percent of the audiences who say it did not agree. I am with them.
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