The Giver’s temptations
The Community’s chief elder, played by a steely Meryl Streep, utters the film’s decisive line: “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.” Her eyes, locked on the viewer, are impossible to ignore. The questions behind that line—the moral wrestling, the tortured ethical calculus, the ambiguity, and the clarity—make for a fine movie. The Giver is the purest form of dystopian narrative, distilled to its most essential elements: power, choice, and the striving for human perfection gone wrong. It’s like an O. Henry story for the hot young adult fiction market.
In this postapocalyptic world the Community is everything. The hero, Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), is likable, earnest, and naive and a contrast to the recent wave of female action heroines—The Hunger Games’s Katniss and Divergent’s Tris. Jonas seems much younger than those heroines, and his drama—true to the rest of the story—is less martial and more interior. The fighter planes and chase scenes seem meant only to keep the film from growing too dreamy.
The film is based on Lois Lowry’s novel of the same title, which won the Newbery Medal in 1994. Perhaps the making of a movie version had to wait for the current revival of interest in dystopias.
