The Giver

The Giver (2014) is about a society from which emotion, colour and the past have been removed. Everyone takes an injection each morning. Nobody suffers, nobody falls in love, nobody fights. Occupations are assigned at sixteen. Jonas is given an odd one: Receiver of Memory. One person in the community remembers the past, and Jonas will replace him. The old man transmits the memories: snow, music, family, war. Jonas sees colour for the first time and the film begins moving from black and white into colour there. It does not happen at once; it opens as he sees more. It comes from Lois Lowry's 1993 novel, one of the most taught and most frequently challenged books in American schools. Behind the film is twenty years of persistence. Jeff Bridges read the novel in the nineties and wanted to make it, imagining his father Lloyd Bridges in the title role. It stalled for years on rights and financing. His father died in the meantime. It was finally made in 2014 and Bridges played the part himself. Meryl Streep plays the woman running the community. The adaptation follows the book but slides toward an action template near the end, closing off the novel's ambiguous finish. It runs 97 minutes. Good for: dystopia, young adult fiction, and conceptual science fiction. Less good for: the idea is not worked as deeply as in the book and the last section turns ordinary.