THE GIVER
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS GALORE
Interesting.
Our tale is set in a dystopian future. Fortunately, we have nothing to fear in our time for a society ruled by a tiny enlightened elite who would reduce the populace to pliant zombies with mind melting chemicals and control over the media. A society claimed to be for human benefit, but where any effort to live the way humans are meant to live is rendered impossible. Our free thinking people would never turn against someone who has become conscious with cries of "Conspiracy Lunatic!"
What some might mistake as an allegory for contempory whitebread suburban American society is an impossible future where conformity, uniformity, and absence of disruptive passions are valued above all. Think 'drug-addled, homosexual prostitute's conception of The American Dream'. Or, imagine the sort of WASPy, control-freaky lefties who would seize control of the neighborhood association of a whiteflight suburb taking their program to it's logical end.
Fear not, intrepid moviegoers, for there is a wise elder "Giver" and a youthful protaganist who is called...wait for it...aahhaaaaa "Receiver". ('Cuz freedom's where it's at, myaaaannn. Ya gotta, like, open your doors of perception, myaaaannn.)
The Giver wears a black blouse with a high collar with a gap in the center and lives like a monk on the edge of the community in a Romanesque rectory full of old manuscripts of forbidden knowledge and with a Mithratic starburst emblazoned in the stone floor in a fashion that NO ONE could EVER call Jesuitical.
"The Receiver" is a teenaged boy who's assigned function in the community is to take the place of the elder Giver as the rememberer of forbidden knowledge (just in case the ruling junta needs to understand banned practices of the past.)
The Giver must pass on his memories and understanding. As we all know, there is only one possible way for the Givuit to impart such information; by suddenly YANKING naive, downey-chinned lads "almost" onto his lap and smashing their naked skin hard against his. The Givuit does this, and the young "Receiver" has his mind suitably liberated.
The Givuit then sends "The Receiver" on a mission to carry a special Receiver baby across a blazing desert, a raging river, and on a snowsled down a frozen mountainside in order to cross the outer borderline, the act of which will cause everyone in the community to remember everything from the past by a method that, I'm sure, made far more sense in the book from which this movie was adapted.
Our epic closes with "The Receiver" carrying the special baby boy as an offering into a shrine dedicated to The Rebirth of the Su-... I mean... taking the baby to a large mountain cabin that appears to be celebrating Christmas.
The moral of the story is clear: Go ahead and surrender to totalitarianism. Let the elite destroy everyone in every possible way. Hand your children over to be defiled and turned utterly depraved. Feed them neuron-melting pills like candy and shoot 'em up with every kind of rat poison. No worries. It's all cool. We have our own Givuits, who are perfectly innocent of all these "evils", scattered around all our communities across the country and, indeed, all over the world. These Givuits stand in their temples filled with their secret wisdom ready to be unleashed onto the forces of "evil" oppression. All they need is a steady supply of pretty little boys, and they're good to go.
You have the Jesuits' word of honor. ;*)
END SPOILERS
This movie had serious flaws attributable to a great love and faithfulness to the book. But, on the whole, I recommend it.
