The Giver

I first read The Giver in grade school, and it has since been in my top three favorite books of all time. Naturally, my expectations were extremely high for the film, especially when I heard who was all going to be in it. With Jeff Bridges as the Giver and Meryl Streep as the Chief Elder, everybody’s hopes were high. Rising star Brenton Thwaites took on the lead role as Jonas, and they couldn’t have picked someone more perfect. Iconic eye color aside, Thwaites is exactly how I pictured Jonas to be. He excellently encapsulated Jonas’s curiosity, intensity, and integrity without over-doing it. The film is set in a futuristic seemingly-utopian society where everything is the same. Everybody wears the same clothes, lives in the same kind of house, and follows the same strict rules. The world that Lois Lowry has created is so intricate and so detailed, but surprisingly uncomplicated. When children come of age a ceremony is held and they are assigned to a job in the community; birthmother, nurturer, teacher, pilot, etc. They then spend the rest of their lives trained for, and working at the one job. They may apply for a spouse and two children if they choose, but then they go to the House of the Old where they are eventually “released.” At Jonas’s ceremony, he is skipped; they don’t call his name. Jonas has been selected to be the Receiver of Memory. In a world where “precision of language” is a high priority, the difference and significance between “assigned” and “selected” is not lost on Jonas. He meets the Giver and is told that their way of life is not the way it has always been. The Giver holds all the memories of the past, good and bad, and now it is his job the give them all to Jonas. As time goes on, Jonas realizes that everyone’s lives are empty without color, emotion, seasons, and choices. It is up to the Giver and Jonas to fix their broken and corrupt community.
It is always difficult to make a book into a movie. It is even more difficult when the book is written in first person because in a movie, you don’t always know what a person is thinking. Even though Thwaites does an amazing job at letting us in on his thoughts with his body language alone, it still left me wanting just a tiny bit more. The book explains everything about the unfamiliar place that Jonas is in. He explains all the rules and regulations and their general way of life. Without being strictly told, it can be a challenge to get all of these amazing intricacies across in film. If you haven’t read the book, you’ll definitely miss out on somethings, but you shouldn’t be too lost. One of my biggest criticisms is Jonas’s eye color. It’s a very small detail, but it carries a lot of weight in the story. People with the ability to “see beyond” have light (blue) eyes. The Giver, Jonas, and two other characters had them in the book, but Jonas has dark eyes in the movie. They made up for it by having each of these four characters having a sort of birthmark on their wrist, but it was an obvious cover-up for the fact that Brenton Thwaites has dark brown eyes. Again, it’s a very small detail, but it was one they should have easily fixed.
The producers seem to have taken a page out of Peter Jackson’s book in that there were things added in the film that weren’t there in the book. Chief Elder played a massive part in the movie, but was almost nonexistent in the book. Personally, I thought it added a lot of dynamic. In the book we only see Jonas’s side of the story, but with the Chief Elder’s bigger role we get a brilliant look at the other side. Fiona also had a much bigger role, but, again, it added a lot to the movie. An important theme of the story is love and the fact that a life without love is an empty life, so Jonas needs someone to love. A romance is hinted at in the book, but that hint is greatly expanded upon and comes to life on film. It brings home that theme of love and has you rooting for their forbidden romance.
One of my favorite parts of both the book and movie is the “giving of memories.” As a young girl it played to my creative imagination, and what was brought to the big-screen is beyond anything I ever imagined. It truly blew me away and left me feeling like I was Jonas experiencing all these new things for the first time.
As a whole I though The Giver was an excellent movie, and a nice change from my usual action film. The old saying, “the book was better,” still holds true, but it was surprisingly close in my opinion. Aside from a few things here and there, they stayed pretty close to the book, even going as far as taking lines straight from the text. It’s a great family film and one I definitely want to see again. Overall, I would give The Giver an 8/10.