THE GIFT (2000)
A psychic woman in a small Georgia town becomes involved in a murder case.

A psychic woman in a small Georgia town becomes involved in a murder case.
Long before he was catapulted into the big leagues by Spider-Man (2002), writer-director Sam Raimi’s filmography suggested he was a horror-and-superhero specialist. It was The Evil Dead (1981) which launched his career, after all, and Darkman (1990) which became his first major box office success (even if it’s now little-remembered). But during these decades he also worked in a range of other genres, including the Western (1995’s The Quick and the Dead), Coen Brothers-style noir (1998’s A Simple Plan), the sports movie (1999’s For Love of the Game), and then Southern Gothic with The Gift.
Of these, A Simple Plan is the highest-regarded. But The Gift at its best certainly comes close. It’s not as sophisticated as A Simple Plan, true, but it’s much more human than the rather artificial-feeling, relentlessly tongue-in-cheek Quick and the Dead. It mixes genres very adroitly—in literal terms, it’s a murder mystery more than anything else, but it’s also a portrayal of a community and its residents, and there is an element of the supernatural as well. (Not horror, though; what’s horrifying in The Gift is entirely down to people.) And the cast is almost uniformly strong, with Cate Blanchett a predictable stand-out and Keanu Reeves a more surprising one.
Written by Billy Bob Thornton (who starred in A Simple Plan) and his frequent collaborator Tom Epperson, The Gift opens with an assembly of Southern Gothic scene-setting elements that might make you worry it’s going to be as overladen with tropes as The Quick and the Dead was: misty woods at night, water everywhere, the sound of frogs and crickets, thunder. But it rapidly becomes much more grounded in a credible, relatable everyday world, introducing us to Annie (Blanchett), a mother and widower who makes ends meet by telling fortunes for her neighbours. (The cards we repeatedly see her using are actually Zener cards, used for ESP research and not for fortune-telling.)
The Gift already breaks with expectations here by making Annie not an idiosyncratic outsider figure—as many movies would with a clairvoyant—but a thoroughly normal woman whose services indeed seem to be as much social work as prediction, and who is at the centre of her community rather than on the edges. She persuades one client he needs to see a doctor about a health issue, she counsels Valerie (Hilary Swank) about her abusive husband, she encourages Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi) to try confronting a past trauma that haunts him, and the most supernatural thing about her might be the level of patience she displays toward her needy customers. There is just a hint of darkness around her abilities, though, glimpsed when she has a disturbing premonition in the office of the local school principal Wayne (Greg Kinnear).
Wayne’s fiancée Jessica (Katie Holmes) is visiting his office at the time this happens, and she will also be an important character; we meet them all quite early on. The ensemble is completed by Valerie’s frighteningly aggressive husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves), and it’s notable that when he accuses Annie of being a “witch”, the combination of writing, direction and Blanchett’s performance has already convinced us of her normality so effectively that—despite her possible occult powers—the term seems ridiculous. Similarly, when she is later mocked by the police chief and a lawyer, we naturally ignore any scepticism we might have, and side with her.
For a while, not much happens. As in a country-house murder mystery—or for that matter as in another Georgia-set movie just a few years earlier, Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)—The Gift takes time to familiarise the viewer with the setting and the key people before dropping its bombshell.
One of the central characters vanishes. The police, at a loss, resort to Annie without expecting much (the sheriff doesn’t believe in her psychic abilities, but any help is better than nothing). She has a vision of where the body might be found, and it is accurate. Another of the central characters is arrested for murder, and his guilt seems a foregone conclusion, but after his trial, Annie starts to have doubts: what if the killer was someone much less expected?
Describing The Gift as Southern Gothic might suggest a degree of grotesquerie, of exaggerated bizarreness in the setting and the people, but Thornton, Epperson and Raimi keep that under very strict control; it’s only really in the character of Buddy, and some of his actions, that things occasionally drift over the top. Instead, The Gift maintains a faint sense of unease, wrongness, and secrets that permeate nearly every scene and hold the interest so well that we barely notice the initially slow pace.
Terrific performances all around also draw us in: though on paper the storyline might look melodramatic, it rarely feels less than plausible thanks to the sheer believability of all the main performers. Blanchett especially was praised at the time of The Gift’s release (even though critics were more lukewarm about the film in general), and deservedly so; she shines especially strongly in a courtroom scene, and if she arguably overdoes the empathic gaze just a tad at times, it’s equally arguable that this is true to character. Kinnear is also persuasive as the school principal, and again though he might seem to rely too much on a kicked-puppy expression, it too is consistent with the behaviour we might expect from Wayne. He is, literally, putting on an upset act.
Reeves as Donnie, pivotal to the plot for a long time, is not only terrific but terrifying—a grim, violent man utterly sure of his rightness and utterly uncaring about others—and the actor’s usual inexpressiveness works well for him here (“scary” Keanu isn’t very far from “serious” Keanu); it’s an inspired bit of casting. Ribisi’s Buddy is perhaps a little too wounded, too dysfunctional, but he’s certainly memorable, as is J.K Simmons’s buffoonish sheriff. He and the lawyer Weems (Michael Jeter) are played for laughs at moments but Raimi and the writers never let humour puncture the essential seriousness of their tale.
The Gift isn’t a masterpiece. A tendency toward the over-dramatic in Christopher Young’s score (enormous clashes and clangs at significant moments) cheapens the atmosphere, and the film is better served by its other music (lots of country from the likes of Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Loretta Lynn, as well as an original song by Neko Case). There are also some rather predictable narrative developments as well as some obvious shots.
But there’s a lot that isn’t predictable and it has such a rich thematic mix: yes, there are Southern Gothic accents but there is also an inherently strong story of a woman coping with bereavement and raising a family, other individuals struggling to cope with their own problems, and a community forced to face the ugliness in its midst. The supernatural is superbly handled, too, as just part of this reality, not the whole of it, not even dominant.
Perhaps it’s because The Gift is so unassuming in so many ways that it has slipped from view. The Southern Gothic here is not extravagant, the supernatural is almost mundane, the dialogue is more prosaic than sparkling, and the plotting isn’t fiendishly clever. But it depicts individual characters and a community so well that anything which might in another film seem predictable, or far-fetched, is in The Gift entirely convincing and engaging. It’s also nothing like Raimi’s better-known movies, tantalisingly suggesting what he might have done if he hadn’t headed off in a more fantastical direction.
USA | 2000 | 112 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
director: Sam Raimi.
writers: Billy Bob Thornton & Tom Epperson.
starring: Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves, Katie Holmes, Greg Kinnear & Hilary Swank.