The Golden Razzies are lame: earlier this year, they (dis)honoured Keanu Reeves for one of the only decent performances he's ever given, in Sam Raimi's The Gift. With his horrendous turns in The Replacements and The Watcher also up for grabs, I can only say that these anti-Oscars would be more clever and thought-provoking if they quit aiming their guns at sitting hams (witness George C. Scott's Raspberry for outstanding work in The Exorcist III): they long ago became the awards equivalent of a male comedian cracking wise about his mother-in-law.

But then, The Gift hasn't garnered much respect at all, except from those who watched for the specific purpose of glimpsing "Dawson's Creek"'s Katie Holmes in the nude. She plays a society slut in this southern gothic, which failed to exceed genre expectations during its staggered theatrical release last winter. Yet there are times when a film should be lauded for fulfilling a set of obligations, and this is one of them.

Cate Blanchett stars as Annie Wilson, a bona fide psychic (her powers of E.S.P. are the titular "gift") with a hazardous clientele. There is battered wife Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank), whose philandering, white-trash husband Donnie (Reeves) believes that the womanly concern Annie shows for Valerie is the start of an occultist brainwash; the bipolar Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi), whose death wish ping-pongs between himself and acquaintances; and, eventually, the loved ones of the missing and presumed-dead Jessica King (Holmes). They each lash out at Annie and her Zener cards for providing the exact objectivity they sought. Fortune telling is like any other profession that involves consultation: if comfort and the truth are mutually exclusive, people generally prefer the former.

The setting is a swampland, natch, full of pious hypocrites like Donnie. A criminal attorney (Michael Jeter at his wormiest)--Donnie's lawyer--gets a courtroom on his side by demonstrating her inability to guess how many fingers he's holding up, and drives it home by asking why she didn't or couldn't predict the accident that killed her husband. The film treats Annie's "gift" as real and innate, which deepens the skepticism that surrounds it. She becomes one of the archetypal horror antiheroes: misunderstood, resented, and feared for her specialness despite predominantly innocent qualities--another spin on the Prometheus myth, it could be argued.

Raimi dabbles in old-fashioned mise-en-scène to match. The Gift revels in blunted weapons jutting into frame and women creeping cautiously down narrow hallways, armed with a baseball bat that might just as well be a candelabra. The most revisited location is a consuming pond populated with eerily lit cypress trees--it looks as though beasts far scarier than alligators reside among them in these waters. (One of Raimi's own 'gifts' is knowing how to shoot a wooded area for maximum oppressive effect; see also A Simple Plan and the first two Evil Dead instalments.) There's an ode to scenes such as the one from Scorsese's Cape Fear remake, with a violent encounter climaxing in a character's slipping and falling on a pool of blood (here red paint). And there are (too) many jump-scares (replete with soundtrack "stingers"), most of which derive from vivid dream sequences, the kind destined to end with the sleeper springing awake, out of breath and sweating coldly.

The Gift was co-written by Billy Bob Thornton, and it probably would've been a more resonant, elegiac piece with him at the helm. By the same token, the cast speaks in his stylized yet authentically provincial vernacular ("I like the way you talk," the two heroes of his Sling Blade confided in each other, echoing our sentiments exactly), and in a movie with a less laconic pace than Thornton the director seems willing to accept. (Not that Raimi is the dolly-crazy auteur he used to be.) The Gift is a thrill machine as efficient as it is atmospheric, and if I was finally let down by the resolution of the central mystery, I felt lucky to have had Blanchett, Reeves, and, especially, Ribisi, as escorts. Buddy's suicidal plea to a stunned Donnie is sure to enter the pantheon of classic Method moments.

Paramount's DVD presentation of The Gift is just that to the film's fans. I never found the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer anything less than gratifying; occasional fluctuations in grain or contrast are both intended and motivated. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix caught me off guard: it's rife with aggressive bass and split-surround cues. One of my favourite moments wasn't thunderous, but unsettling: Donnie comes a-calling on Annie late at night (chapter 11), and his voice and actions are isolated in the rear speakers. We sense a psychopath looming behind us. Extras on this generously-indexed (46 chapters!) disc include the studio's now-standard interview compilation, the 10-minute "The Gift: A Look Inside" (wherein Raimi reveals he was initially turned off by the script's dark qualities!); the theatrical trailer; and the music video for Neko Case & Her Boyfriends' gorgeous "Furnace Room Lullaby," the finest melancholic theme song this side of Angelo Badalamenti's collaborations with David Lynch.-Bill Chambers

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
111 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.85:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Dolby Surround,
French Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English
DVD-9
Region One
Paramount

the critic

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Published: July 20, 2001