DIRECTOR
Sam Raimi
SCREENWRITERS
Billy Bob Thornton
Tom Epperson
PRODUCERS
James Jacks
Tom Rosenberg
Robert G. Tapert
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Jamie Anderson
MUSIC
Christopher Young
EDITOR
Arthur Coburn
Bob Murawski
CAST
Cate Blanchett (Annie Wilson)
Giovanni Ribisi (Buddy Cole)
Greg Kinnear (Wayne Collins)
Hilary Swank (Valerie Barksdale)
Keanu Reeves (Donnie Barksdale)
Katie Holmes (Jessica King)
Michael Jeter (Gerald Weems)
Kim Dickens (Linda)
Gary Cole (David Duncan)
Rosemary Harris (Annie's Granny)
J.K. Simmons (Sheriff Johnson)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 111m
U.S. release: December 20, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official site
Other Sam
Raimi films
reviewed on this website:
- Army
of Darkness
- Darkman
- For
Love of the Game
- A
Simple Plan
- Spider-Man
|
Sam
Raimi's upcoming Spider-Man
is one of the most hotly awaited movies of next year, and it's
easy to see why: His past three films -- A
Simple Plan, For
Love of the Game, and his latest, The Gift --
have been deadly dull, and his fans are hoping a big-budget superhero
movie might wake him up. It would be sad work to determine which
of his recent Hollywood films is the worst -- the most severe
betrayal of the filmmaker he used to be -- though For Love
of the Game may have the edge. The Gift is, like A
Simple Plan, a respectable thriller anyone could have directed.
There's not an ounce of Raimi's former playfulness in it; a vibrant
director is dying before our eyes.
The pulpy-gothic script comes courtesy of Billy Bob Thornton
and Tom Epperson, the former of whom might have served the movie
better by appearing in it than by writing it. Thornton is a decent
screenwriter -- the Academy obviously thought so, awarding his
Sling
Blade -- and he and Epperson contributed a valuable film
noir entry in 1992, One False Move. But The Gift
feels as if the duo had written it before One False Move
-- it carries the stale odor of the trunk, and it trades complexity
for complication. Such an amalgam of Southern-gothic clichés
could have been fun if handled with wit and juice, but Raimi
isn't that kind of director any more. He proceeds as though each
scene deserved humorless precision.
Cate Blanchett doesn't quite make the movie worth seeing, but
she does make herself worth seeing in it. She plays Annie Wilson,
a Georgia psychic who reads fortunes for the troubled locals.
Among her clientele are Valerie (Hilary Swank), who routinely
displays fresh wounds from her despicable husband Donnie (Keanu
Reeves), and a discombobulated mechanic named Buddy (Giovanni
Ribisi), whose suicidal impulses have something to do with his
father. It would've been more fun if Annie were a bogus psychic,
or at least a genuinely caring person who counsels people under
the guise of fortune-telling, but apparently she's on the level.
It's not long before she's having nightmarish visions of local
tramp Katie Holmes and the waterlogged fate that may be in store
for her.
Holmes goes out of the picture fast, so that we don't have to
worry about her painful accent except in flashbacks, and the
movie allegedly gets down to business: Annie's visions have led
the police to the vicious Donnie, who is fingered for the murder,
but Annie's not so sure. Ah, irony! The guy you think is the
killer isn't actually the killer. Okay, who is it, then?
Is it the vengeful Valerie, hoping to get her husband sent up
for a long stretch? Is it the dead girl's fiancé (Greg
Kinnear), a milquetoast principal? Is it the unstable Buddy?
Is it the attorney (Gary Cole) who liked to meet Holmes for a
quick bang in the office? Is it anyone we remotely care about?
To this, at least, I can render an honest answer: No.
The Gift becomes a cruelly tedious whodunit, unredeemed
by the local color of its setting (at times it's like a supernatural,
made-for-TV version of Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil). Except for poor Giovanni
Ribisi, prompted to slobber all over the camera (he must never
be asked to abandon his deadpan cool to this extent again), the
actors acquit themselves competently, giving the naturalistic,
television-level performances Raimi seems to require these days.
(Watching Hilary Swank, I couldn't help thinking of her Brandon
Teena with a wig on. She may pay a heavy price for that brilliant
performance.) Keanu Reeves, you may have heard, acts his ass
off as the scary husband. He does, but he also overdoes the character's
redneck white-trashness, letting his voice slide into a deep
Georgia rumble and generally overdoing Donnie's violent hatefulness
to the point where you wonder why the cops didn't put him away
long ago.
Blanchett does as much as her considerable talent will allow,
but in the end she's beating her head against a flawless martyr
role, a lone woman whom nobody will believe -- until they believe
her wrongly, after which nobody believes her some more.
She's also given Greg Kinnear as a love interest, and though
Kinnear is a deft light comedian, you can't picture him with
a woman like Cate Blanchett, who deserves a hot and funny guy
to be sultry and playful with. Kinnear can be funny, but he's
well-cast as a dull principal, and gives a performance to match.
Much better, in a small but winning role, is the fine character
actor J.K. Simmons, appearing in the middle film of his Raimi
trilogy (he was in For Love of the Game and will be in
Spider-Man). Perhaps best known for his loathsome Nazi
convict Vern Schillinger on HBO's Oz, Simmons has a way
of investing his dialogue with casual but powerful authority
(which makes his racist grumblings on Oz that much more
appalling). He appears here as the skeptical town sheriff, who
at crucial points of tension takes a meaningful pause, as if
musing about the murder case, and then demands to know who ate
the last eclair or whether anyone brought a Thermos of coffee.
Aside from the unintentional laughs earned by Ribisi and Holmes,
Simmons is the movie's only lifeline to humor.
I'd almost rather not write about The Gift -- it does
hurt to be slamming a director whose past films (the Evil
Dead trilogy, Darkman)
are so dear to my heart. But if Raimi is going to do such a perfunctory
thriller, can't he at least work up some brooding poetry? His
handling of Annie's visions smacks of too many made-for-cable
movies, and some of it feels left over from What
Lies Beneath. (Raimi does permit one moment of spooky
beauty, when a single bright spill of blood creeps down Cate
Blanchett's pale cheek.) Towards the finish, the wrong side of
our brains is engaged -- the dank atmosphere and what passes
for characterization aren't allowed to enfold us, because we're
too busy second-guessing the plot. By the time a deus ex machina
in the form of a convenient apparition comes to save the day,
most people will have thoroughly given up on the movie. Who would
have thought Sam Raimi could have made a film in which the dead
are harmless, even helpful? For a backwoods supernatural thriller,
The Gift is only slightly more frightening than For
Love of the Game. Gone are the malicious trees of The
Evil Dead, which seemed to have a horrid life of their own
even before they started ripping into people; the woods in this
movie are just window dressing. So is everything else, including
the director. |