Flak Magazine: Review of The Gift, 1-24-01

When it was announced that Sam Raimi would helm The Gift, a supernatural Southern gothic thiller penned by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, those fans who have followed the director throughout his career rejoiced. Raimi established himself as the cranked-up-to-11 horror auteur behind the Evil Dead trilogy, but it was apparent he was more than a visual wizard — his wit and storytelling acumen were fresh air to a genre starved for those qualities and a joy buzzer to a cinema quick to take itself too seriously. As imperfect as Darkman and The Quick and the Dead may be, they abounded in personality and style.

Raimi made a bold step away from his highly polished genre gems and toward respectability in 1998, when he released his Treasure of the Sierra Madre redux A Simple Plan, one of the decade’s great American films. It refined his gonzo style without sacrificing his remarkable eye for composition, resulting in a classical narrative as well told as any has been for years.

Then he made a Kevin Costner baseball movie, a prospect so chilling that even Raimi faithful (I’ve been trying to avoid saying “I” here) couldn’t bring themselves to watch it. He also managed to get himself attached to Sony’s Spider-Man, a summer tentpole easily as anticipated as the sequels to Star Wars and The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Which is why now is the perfect time for The Gift, which combines the horror for which Raimi is notorious, a screenplay from writers whose credits include great works like One False Move and Sling Blade and a cast featuring Oscar veterans like Cate Blanchett, Hilary Swank and Greg Kinnear. If there were ever a time when, as a director, Raimi had something to prove, it’s now; if there were ever a proving ground for him, it’s The Gift.

You can probably see where this is going.

Of all the qualities that put The Gift squarely in the race for Most Disappointing Movie of 2000, the soul-crushingest is how anonymous it is. Supernatural-tinged thrillers have been a hot commodity recently, mostly the products of work-a-day directors like Taylor Hackford and Charles Russell and usually undistinguished and indistinguishable. The Gift deserves a place right beside them, or, more accurately, right in the middle of them — it’s as average as you can get.

Blanchett stars as Annie, who peddles her meager psychic abilities in Brixton, Ga. She counsels Valerie (Swank) to leave her abusive husband Donny (Keanu Reeves) — advice Donny doesn’t care for, and he tells Annie as much in no uncertain, but certainly threatening, terms. And when the town’s favorite daughter Jessica (Katie Holmes) turns up dead, Annie’s visions implicate Donny. Did he do it, and, if not, who did?

It’s not a bad premise, and one that should certainly allow Raimi to illuminate the furthest corners of his directorial abilities as well as let Thornton and Epperson explore the spooky side of the down-home flavor they so often favor. But watching The Gift clumsily unfold gives a viewer the sense that this movie was once 30 minutes longer and that it’s been cut down to exclude everything but what will allow for the barest sense of coherence. The prospect of a better movie haunts The Gift more convincingly that any supernatural entity.

The tragedy is that there’s been no reports of troubles on the set, of creative difference between the filmmakers. There’s no reason to believe that the version of The Gift in theaters is anything but the exact one they set out to make. As such, it’s hard to see why the movie was made. Although individual sequences are edited to good effect, the movie as a whole has a sluggish pace. Intriguing story elements — why does the seemingly God-fearing Donny have a voodoo doll? Why does Annie flash back, multiple times, to a character who confides/warns “I’ve been thinking un-Christian thoughts”? What will come of Annie blackmailing a respected member of the community? — disappear without a trace. When a plot point is reached, the screenplay consistently takes the least interesting way out. By the beginning of the third act, viewers have a clear sense of who the possible murderer is — one likely candidate; two well-established, red-herring possibilities; and even a couple of hinted-at long shots — and guess who the movie hangs it on? The obvious one with the most obvious motive.

When you choose to work on such a superficial tableau, the only viable recourse is to dig into it deeply, to find the profound beneath the archetypal. That’s also not on display here. While interesting ideas are toyed with — such as the possibility that the best insight Annie can provide into the murder is from a clue perceived with her five regular senses — they’re discarded. This is a very serviceable potboiler, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s because it is.

And, sadly, Raimi just phones it in. The film features two genuinely spooky moments — one involving a tree, one involving a fiddle — but everything else, especially the stuff that Raimi is supposed to specialize in, is paint-by-number. Even his usually infallible eye for compelling composition fails him here, and he gets no help from the unremarkable camera of cinematographer Jamie Anderson.

Just to twist the knife, the filmmakers have provided a surprise ending straight out of the hoariest campfire stories. As with the whole movie, this turn is imbued with a quiet grace from the actors — the only ones really earning their paychecks here — but it’s so loudly telegraphed to anyone with a passing familiarity with scary stories that it won’t make audience members gasp so much as it will remind them that this is the kind of movie during which they expected to be gasping. The only thing here to really inspire awe or fright is that such a promising collection of talent can achieve so little.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)