Katie Holmes has closed a deal to join Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges in The Giver, a drama from The Weinstein Co. and Walden Media that's being directed by Phillip Noyce, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Brenton Thwaites is the young star of the sci-fi project, which tells of a society in which there is no conflict, racism or sickness.

Thwaites plays a young boy, Jonas, who is selected for his life service as the Receiver of Memories and works with The Giver (Bridges), an old man who teaches the boy to use his unique gifts of the senses. Streep is the society's Chief Elder, an authoritative and antagonistic woman who assigns the young their tasks.

Holmes will play Thwaites' mother, a strict obeyer of the laws that govern what is described as an antiseptic society.

The movie, which is eyeing a budget of around $25 million, is being produced by Nikki Silver of Tonik Productions along with Neil Koenigsberg and Bridges.

Michael Mitnick wrote the most recent script adapting the Lois Lowry YA novel.

A shoot in South Africa is being planned, although it is likely that Steep will shoot her scenes in England, where she is filming Disney's Into the Woods.

“In the “ideal” world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are “released”--to great celebration--at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also “released,”' but with no fanfare.

Lowry's development of this civilization is so deft that her readers, like the community's citizens, will be easily seduced by the chimera of this ordered, pain-free society. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment--the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory--he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world.

With a storyline that hints at Christian allegory and an eerie futuristic setting, this intriguing novel calls to mind John Christopher's Tripods trilogy and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. Lowry is once again in top form--raising many questions while answering few, and unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers,” a review published at The Publisher Weekly said.