The Gift
|It’s a year since Annie Wilson’s husband died, leaving her alone to raise their three young children, making ends meet on welfare boosted by donations given to her by the clients who visit her to experience the gift she has, laying out the Zener cards and seeing what they tell her, guiding them to the things they need to express rather than telling them what they want to hear, though sometimes she doesn’t need “the sight” to see the obvious.
The bruises her friend Valerie Barksdale can’t hide making it clear she should leave her violent husband Donnie, he takes exception to Annie’s interference in his marriage, breaking into the house, threatening her and the children, the local police disinterested in her complaint because they’re “squirrel hunting buddies” with Donnie, but when the daughter of a local businessman goes missing and Annie has a vision of her leading to discovery of the body on the Barksdale’s property Donnie becomes prime suspect in the murder of Jessica King.
Directed by Sam Raimi after his Evil Dead trilogy but before his Spider-Man trilogy, The Gift is more subdued than any of those, more akin to A Simple Plan released two years before in 1998, a tense and sinister supernatural thriller full of haunting images of the mist rising over the bayous of Georgia, with Rumours’ Cate Blanchett magnificent as Annie, possessed of a gift she cannot return which has brought her pain rather than riches, her visions intrusive nightmares of terrifying reality rather than dreamlike images of placid enlightenment.
The moods of the film changing like storm clouds sweeping in on a summer afternoon, Keanu Reeve is Donnie, a small-town wife beater with a big mouth and angry fists, tarring Annie as a witch as the prosecutor implies she led the police to his pond in revenge for their existing grudge, while Giovanni Ribisi’s Buddy Cole may be equally uneducated and without prospects but sees Annie as a loyal friend, a man disturbed by his traumatic past but whose unpredictable rage is to set things on the path of right.
Written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, The Gift perhaps suffers from too few suspects as to who actually did kill Jessica (Katie Holmes), perhaps inevitable in a small town, but with the repeated images of water, bodies immersed and floating, reflections distorted and true, overflowing baths and taps dripping blood, it is carried by the mesmerising Blanchett, a woman trying to negotiate a gift equal parts blessing and burden which has brought neither happiness nor an easy life in a southern state where the word of an honest woman will always be secondary to the accusations of a man.
Remastered from the 35mm interpositive, Arrow’s new edition of The Gift includes two newly recorded audio commentaries, an isolated music and effects track, new interviews with actor Chelcie Ross (Kenneth King, father of the murdered woman), editors Bob Murawski and Arthur Coburn, composer Christopher Young, archival featurettes and interviews with Raimi, Blanchett, Reeves and Ribisi, premiere footage and a music video for Neko Case’s Furnace Room Lullaby, a song which doesn’t actually feature prominently in the film but which also evokes the Southern Gothic spirit.
The Gift will be released on Blu-ray and 4K UHD by Arrow Films on Monday 27th January