Director Report Card: Sam Raimi (2000)

9. The Gift

Following the utter failure of “For Love of the Game,” I suspect Sam Raimi was looking to bounce back. I suspect he hoped to re-create his last critical success by re-teaming with one of his “A Simple Plan” collaborators. Aside from being a critically acclaimed actor, Billy Bob Thornton is also an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He would write “The Gift” based on the experiences of his own mother, who claimed to be a psychic, and growing up in the American south. Clearly, Thornton enjoyed working with Raimi on “A Simple Plan,” as he would hand the script over to the director. While “The Gift” wasn't much of a box office hit, it did see Raimi recovering a bit from his baseball flop.

Widower Annie Wilson lives in the steamy, swamp lands of Brixton, Georgia. Annie is gifted with the powers of psychic visions, sometimes seeing the past or the future in her mind. She works as the town fortune teller to support her three sons. She encounters different people from around town. Like Valerie Barksdale, whose abusive husband believes Annie is a witch and threatens her with violence. Or Buddy Cole, a mentally ill man badly traumatized from being sexually abused by his father as a boy. When Jessica King, daughter of a local wealthy man, disappears, everyone assumes the worst. Annie receives visions of Jessica's corpse and ends up fingering Donnie Barksdale for the murder. But the whole truth has yet to reveal itself...

Billy Bob Thornton hasn't just played a number of country bumpkins and rednecks. He frequently writes about them too. “Sling Blade” is only the most obvious example, as “A Family Thing,” “Jayne Manfield's Car,” and “Daddy and Them” deal with similar subjects. It's an aesthetic that can similarly be described as Southern Gothic or Southern-fried noir. Luckily, either title blends nicely with Raimi's established style. “The Cure” begins with a moody shot of the Georgia bayou, fog billowing over the water. This is before the night sky is broken by a lightning bolt. From there, a tale of twisting alliances, supernatural visions, murder,  and mental issues among backwoods folks spins out. It's almost as if Thornton wrote the film specifically for Raimi, the two line up so well.

After being gone for what seemed like a while, “The Cure” also represents Sam Raimi returning to his horror roots. The film is not a full-blown horror picture, probably being better described as a thriller. (And best described as supernatural noir.) However, Raimi directs it like horror. Annie's visions involve the monstrous sight of bloated corpses leaping from a bathtub or a dead girl floating in the air. Dynamic shots of fists swinging into the camera or unnerving nightmare sequences drive the best moments. An especially effective shots has a man's threatening shadow cast on the wall, while Annie tensely explores a house she's worried is no longer safe. He even includes some of his trademark whip-pans and crash-zooms, which sometimes almost becomes distracting. Yet it's certainly great to see Raimi finding his groove again, after all but abandoning it with “For Love of the Game.”

This isn't exactly “The Evil Dead” though. With “The Cure,” the director is applying his more mature approach to the pulpy material. Raimi's earlier movies almost gleefully killed off their characters, enjoying tormenting them before offing them in spectacularly grisly ways. Now, the director is grappling more seriously with the concept of death. Annie and her sons are still grappling with the death of her husband. She predicted his fiery death in a factory explosion but was unable to stop it. Since then, she can even bring herself to visit his grave, much to her oldest boy's chagrin. The psychic reality of her gruesome visions haunt her. Death weighs heavily on the minds of “The Gift's” characters.

Another idea, which is maybe more Thornton than Raimi, is also floating around inside “The Gift.” Both of Annie's most regular costumers have suffered at the hands of men. Buddy Cole has been left utterly traumatized by the abuse his father inflicted on him, barely able to function in everyday life without suffering breakdowns. Eventually, he attempts to burn his father alive. Valerie Barksdale is beaten black and blue by her utterly toxic husband, a sociopathic Christian who uses his faith to persecute Annie but has no problem threatening children or screwing around on his wife. This stands in contrast to Annie's husband, who was seemingly idyllic, and her relationship with her own kids, which is never less than totally patient and protective. Yet it also speaks more to the film's thematic concerns, of a world ravaged by hateful, abusive men.

Speaking to this, “The Gift” works best when about a single mother under threat. This is most apparent in the movie's fantastic first act. From the moment Valerie walks into Annie's house, her face black and blue with bruises, a quiet tension floats over the film. It's not long before Donnie is storming into the house, knocking over paint and dragging Valerie away. He feels so threatened by a woman with power, supernatural or otherwise, that he tries to intimate her sons and breaks into the house and leaves shitty messages. In these moments, “The Gift” becomes a fantastically effective thriller about a woman who has to protect everything she has left against a raging gonad of an abuser.

Unfortunately, a lot of that tension deflates in the second half. After those wonderfully spooky visions, Annie leads the police to Jessica's corpse, floating in Donnie Barksdale's lake. He's arrested and suddenly the movie changes direction. “The Gift” becomes a murder/mystery, Annie functioning as a detective, teaming up with Jessica's fiance to uncover the truth – Donnie is a scumbag but he didn't kill her – and put things to right. This is set up early enough, Annie stumbling upon one of many potential suspects during a visit to a restaurant. However, this is ultimately not as interesting a story. Once Donnie is in prison, and the immediate threat to Jessica's life is removed, a lot of tenseness goes out of the film.

The conclusion to that murder mystery is especially underwhelming. The courtroom scenes are a bit ham-fisted, the characters sometimes flinging some on-the-nose dialogue around. The investigation kicks into gear afterwards. But there's a problem. The audience figures out who killed Jessica fairly early, narrowing down the lists of suspects quickly enough. Even more disappointingly, the film then has the killer reveal himself in a fairly non-dramatic way, flat-out telling the audience and Annie what he did. The day is then saved by a ghost, which borders on a deus ex machina. It's a bit of a bummer that, after being fairly proactive for most of the film, Jessica doesn't even get to uncover the killer's identity and save herself.

Even if the script sometimes fails her, the actress playing Jessica never does. Cate Blanchett has been so good, for so long, one can't help but take her for granted. Affecting a Southern accent with no problem, Blanchett creates an utterly compelling protagonist. She is vulnerable, when need be, still clearly stinging over her husband's death. She is terrified, of both her visions and the threat floating over her family's head. Yet, despite being scared, she marches ahead anyway, doing what she knows to be right. Blanchett beautifully, naturally enacts all these feelings and emotions. “The Gift” may occupy a difficult world but its protagonist, and the actress playing her, is always sturdy.

Watching “The Gift” in 2019 is especially interesting for another reason the filmmakers never could've guessed at the time. In the burnt-out hellscape of our modern age, the youth are hungry for sincerity and wholesomeness. Weirdly, Keanu Reeves is currently the internet's symbol of those feelings. So it's sort of funny to watch him so perfectly play a real piece of shit here. Reeves plays Donnie Barksdale as a disgusting creep, who beats his wife brutally just for the hell of it, who isn't above striking a little kid. When in court, he begrudgingly admits to this, not exactly seeming proud but not exactly being ashamed of himself either. Keanu is surprisingly good at it. Watching Reeves cut loose during several scenes of sinister menace or angry outbursts are a lot of fun too.

There is a solid supporting cast here too. Giovanni Ribisi discards any actorly pride to play Buddy Cole as a truly pathetic person, controlled by out-of-balance emotions he has no reign over. It's a shockingly sad and accurate portrayal of someone barely functioning under the strain of PTSD. Hilary Swank's Southern accent isn't as good as Blanchett's but she does give a decent performance as a woman pulled in different directions by multiple feelings. I've always found there to be something greasy and unlikable about Greg Kinnear, hiding under a mask of insincere glad-handing, which ends up making him perfect for his role here. Katie Holmes, sadly, is a bit underserved in the role of Jessica, which the script seems fine with reducing to the concept of the town slut. Truthfully, it's the Raimi Regulars that shine. J.K. Simmons has a hilarious role as the skeptical sheriff. Gary Cole is nicely smarmy as the town attorney, who is hiding secrets of his own. Rosemary Harris' sole scene as Annie's grandmother is a stand-out, framed as an eerie daydream but center by Harris' warm grace.

During post-production, Raimi would get his next job, the film that would truly change his career forever. "The Gift" barely outgrossed its budget at the box office and wouldn't make much of an impression with critics or audiences. (Though those critics that did like it were enthusiastic.) It's almost as if “The Gift” was destined to be overlooked. However, the film represents an important course correction for Raimi, showing he can still generate down-home tension and atmosphere with electrifying direction like nobody else. A top-notch cast further helps create a memorable film. The script eventually peters out, which is a bummer because “The Gift” was working fantastically up to that point. [Grade: B]