The Gift

Title: The Gift
Rating: 3/5
Genre: Mystery, Thiller, Horror
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reaves, Katie Holmes, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank
Director: Sam Raimi

“You're the soul of this town, Ms Wilson, and you just need to keep doing what you are doing.”

From the man who’s early work saw the rise in the ‘Evil Dead’ trilogy, and later work the atrocities of the ‘Spiderman’ series, this sits squarely in between both in the date it was released (2000) and in quality. Hardly a low budget film with a plethora of capable cast members who – perhaps in a break of tradition – are capable of dragging what could easily have been an atrocity from the depths of mediocrity. The mystery element is too predictable; the ‘twists’ virtually revealed well before their actual unveiling, and the horror element too failed at providing anything remotely haunting. Instead it is the strength of the characters, each unique with their own problems that never fails to captivate as we explore their struggle to overcome the adversity which they face, and where the all-star cast are let loose to prove their abilities.

The plot slowly unfolds as we are introduced to Annie Wilson (Blanchett), a single mother of three boys scraping a living by delivering psychic readings – as much a social worker, helping and giving advice to those who need it as opposed to the more stereotypical psychic notion. She soon ends up causing trouble advising Valerie Barksdale (Swank) to leave her abusive husband Donnie (Reaves), who threatens her in return. Things go from bad to worse when the rich girl Jessica King (Holmes) goes missing, and Annie starts seeing visions of her gruesome murder.

Thankfully both Holmes and Swank had fairly minor roles to play as both felt fairly mediocre; particularly the latter of the two failing to provoke an emotional response from a character that we should be made to empathise with. Kinnear performed aptly, lending neither a spectacular believability but creating perhaps the most subtle performance as the grieving fiancée of Jessica. Blanchett kept things together superbly, and displayed a multi-layered character to centre the plot around without it becoming tiring. Perhaps more importantly was the manner in which she displayed her ESP abilities, not used as some form of gimmick or indeed overused – she may be able to sense something bad is going to happen, but nothing more detailed – that neatly forms the thread joining the plot together.

The really memorable characters, however, were those performed by Reaves and Ribisi (playing Buddy, a troubled young man with a close friendship to Blanchett). Normally I would be one of the first to contemplate the attraction to Reaves as an actor, with a deadpan expression that fails to display more emotional depth than a wood with a smiling face drawn on it, but here he succeeds in producing a character that whilst evil is altogether still human, and it is this realism that transforms him into a character I would barely recognise. In a similar fashion, it is Blanchett’s relationship to Ribisi’s character that yields the emotional punch; something of a plot sideline that really should have had more time devoted to it as it surpassed the main story in many ways than one.

The soundtrack was of little note, opening and closing with the same violin-based track to display the continuity but otherwise all too readily forgotten. The dialogue at times felt a little cliché, something that seems all too frequent with films set in the southern US, but the locations utilised succeeded in being incredibly atmospheric and powerfully accentuated the course of the story. The plot had a continual unfurling that flowed fairly well, even if it took you to places you wouldn’t expect (notably to court in crucible-like manner) and remained interesting. The mystery and horror elements may have fallen horribly flat, but the end result still isn’t that bad.