Dec
12
The Gift (2001)
December 12, 2009 | |
and they all sapped strength from the film’s already rather weak mystery
story.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The Gift is a supernatural thriller whose motto is: ‘always follow
your instincts.’ The psychic said that was how she was taught to believe
by her kindly grandmother and by taking that advice I was able to instantly
guess who the murderer was, while the film’s psychic had lapses of memory
and forgot from time to time that handy motto. Unfortunately because of
that gaffe and the film’s gaping holes in logic, I wasn’t absorbed by this
moody and atmospheric thriller as much as I should have been. When you
see how the film will be resolved before the main character does and that
person is playing a psychic, then there is something amiss. The suspense
always felt tacked on to all the psychic visions that dramatically kept
the pot boiling.
The mystery takes place in a rundown Southern small-town (it was
filmed in Savannah, Ga.); and, it involves a saintly widow who gets involved
in a murder mystery, while supporting three small boys because her husband
got killed in a factory explosion accident last year. Cate Blanchett gives
a haunting performance as the psychic Annie Wilson, someone who is both
vulnerable and strong in character.
The film opens as Annie is reading her special cards to her clients.
Annie’s girlfriend Linda (Dickens) wants to know what kind of man is in
her future; Valerie Barksdale (Swank) is an abused woman who is afraid
to confront her redneck husband Donnie (Reeves) about the regular beatings
he administers and is advised by Annie to leave him.
In town Annie runs into a mentally disturbed and violent young garage
mechanic with a death wish, Buddy Cole (Ribisi), who is all bottled up
about his relationship with his father and she tries to get him to face
those bitter childhood memories. Ribisi’s portrayal was hammy and particularly
uninteresting.
The first half of the film builds up a case against what a wretched
monster this Donnie is, how he calls Annie a satanic witch and threatens
her and the children if she meddles in his marriage; he even violates her
household by sneaking in to use her cards to spell out satan on her bed.
The mystery event occurs when an attractive but promiscuous young woman
from a prominent family, Jessica King (Holmes), who is engaged to the clean-cut
school principal, Wayne Collins (Kinnear), turns up missing. Sheriff Johnson
(Simmons) is not a believer in psychics, nevertheless is forced to call
on Annie at Mr. King’s insistence. Annie dreams that Jessica is dead in
a pond, and when the sheriff’s men dredge Donnie’s pond they find her body
there and arrest him.
When the case goes to trial Annie is surprised at who the district
attorney (Cole) is, because he was seen the night before the murder by
her making love to Jessica in the ladies’ room of the rich social club
she was visiting with her friend Linda. The trial was poorly filmed and
made a mockery of how a trial should be run. Everything about it seemed
unbelievable, as there was one scene where Annie is ridiculously attacked
by the defense lawyer (Jeter) on a personal basis while the district attorney
doesn’t even object.
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This whodunit had many contrivances and they all sapped strength
from the film’s already weak mystery story. The two things that kept this
film watchable were the suspenseful visuals of Annie’s dark visions –
eerily recalling things from the dead world, and Cate’s gifted performance
that brought more to the story than the script by Billy Bob Thornton and
Tom Epperson could provide. This is a return for Mr. Raimi (”The Evil Dead”)
to his B-film origins, but this time with a Hollywood budget. As a Hollywood
film it fails to deliver enough punch to be a box-office hit, but as a
B-film it seems easier to overlook the film’s lack of punch and accept
its ordinary Gothic story for all the possiblities it had.