"The Giver" (2014) movie review

• IMDB

Jeff Bridges, "the Giver"

Meryl Streep, "Chief Elder"

Brenton hwaites, "Jonas" (Jonah--the prophet swallowed by the big fish!)

Katie Holmes, "Mother"

Odeya Rush, "Fiona"

Cameron Monaghan, "Asher"

Taylor Swift, "Rosemary"

Tradition

Great model of Tradition. We are all "receivers" of God's Word. We need to absorb the tradition and hand on to the next generation what was handed on to us.

The movie does not show Jonas reading any of the books in the library, nor discussing their meaning with "The Giver." Reading and understanding is hard work. The movie uses a commonplace of modern science-fiction as a shortcut for education: the Giver and the Receiver just join hands and have a "Vulcan mind-meld" (Star Trek; Paul; Harry Potter), with memories being transferred automatically and inerrantly from one person to the another.

It takes training, time, and effort to develop the virtues necessary to grasp the Tradition (the memories of Mother Church) and to become proficient in using her self-understanding to teach the mysteries of the faith to the next generation. "Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance."

I understand the necessity of the plot device as a shortcut to make the movie watchable, but I lament the reinforcement it gives to our desire to be passive learners. It is the kind of "education" that couch potatoes and internet surfers desire.

notes while watching the movie

Great demonstration of how sad the grey dystopia is. Awful!

"Balance." "With good there is always bad." YUCK!

Color, race, religion.

Piano--but no piano tuner!

The Giver: "Doubt all authority, even if you like the authority." Self-contradictory nonsense!

Noah's Ark! What if we could start all over with a purified family? Would we be happy?

What is the cause of our unhappiness? What is the true cure?

Jonas: "If you can't feel, what is the point?"

The Giver is more of a hero in this movie than in the novel? How did he have a daughter? Who was her mother? Unstated reality of the dystopia: no sex? All babies generated by genetic scientists? Did they choose to make Jonas as a seer? Was he a random mutation of some sort--needed, but not designed?

The movie's answer: "To love someone." We are designed for love. Love requires freedom. Without freedom, there can be no love, only a poor substitute. Mother: "Precision of language!" Love has no meaning in a world where sublimation, self-sacrifice, is achieved by a daily dose of drugs.

The Giver: "We could choose better." Christian existentialism.

Theme: "Life is good," even if it comes at the expense of allowing errors and sin. Theodicy.

Christmas carol, "Silent Night," played very, very softly at the end, sung by the Trapp Family Singers. Jonas: "I will not apologize for what I have done. This will lead us home."

Happier ending than in the novel? Restoration of everyone's memories and feelings? Immediate relief from the effects of the drug? "Movie magic."

In memory of her son

In memoriam: Major Grey Lowry.

"The Children’s Author Who Actually Listens to Children."

Very early in the morning of Memorial Day, 1995, the children’s author Lois Lowry was awakened by a telephone call from Germany. It was still dark outside the windows of her little brick house in Cambridge, Mass., when she heard her daughter-in-law explain that Lowry’s son Grey, an Air Force flight instructor, died when his F-15 crashed on takeoff.

The mechanics had attached two control rods into the wrong sockets — a problem caused more by sloppy design than by sloppy mechanical work. Those same control rods nearly caused two previous crashes, and multiple reports had recommended easy fixes. The Air Force ignored those suggestions until Grey Lowry’s death but still made an example of the mechanics — court-martialing them and withholding crucial information from the defense team. The day the trial was meant to begin, one of the mechanics shot himself in the head. He left a note to the Lowry family that read: “I know I am going to heaven. And in heaven I cannot hurt anyone else, not even by accident.”

When Lowry lost her son, she had recently published “The Giver,” a slim novel about a boy in an isolated community discovering the terrible secrets behind the pleasant, emotionless life he and his friends live. In “The Giver,” Jonas, upon his 12th birthday, is apprenticed to the title character — the repository of the community’s collective memory and the one man who remembers what it was like when citizens experienced love, sadness, danger, death, lust. (Even color is a mystery to most of the community.) When Jonas learns that Gabriel, a fussy baby he has come to love, is slated for extermination, he kidnaps Gabriel and escapes into an uncertain future.