THE GIFT (2000) A better gift than gonorrhea, but not by much The Gift is Sam Raimi's chick flick. This is his gift to the housewifey crowd who like Southern-set mysteries set in motion and ultimately solved with a lonely woman's psychic powers, the kind of thing that keeps cropping up around 11PM on channel 23. It isn't just a psychic mystery, but one that has Keanu Reeves in it, and Hilary Swank in a role where she looks even worse than in that movie where she pretended to be a guy. Cate Blanchett plays Annie Wilson, a widowed mother of three boys who works out of her house as a psychic counsellor, though much of her advice is of the common sense variety (i.e. don't ask me, ask a professional - good advice from a lady using ESP cards as a Tarot deck). We see in short order that she really does have some degree of psychic powers, though they can manifest themselves a little obliquely. A whole herd of Southern small-town stereotypes finds their way into her life; the vindictive prosecutor (Gary Cole), the slutty rich girl (Katie Holmes), the kindly schoolteacher (Greg Kinnear), the abusive husband and the wife who can't seem to get enough of it (Reeves and Swank). Where's the corrupt mayor and the fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher, conspicuous in their absence? Holmes goes missing, and after four days of finding nothing, her dad (Chelcie Ross) enlists Blanchett's aid, who is shown the way in a dream and leads the sheriff (J.K. Simmons) to Holmes' body in Keanu's pond. Ah, Keanu. You might know the esteem in which I hold Keanu. Of his performance here, I will say this, the highest praise of him I've been able to muster since he played Ted Logan, or at least the guy in Speed: he's not the problem. He looks perfect for the part (looks like he bulked up for the role, patchy beard, eyes so dark they're almost black), and his delivery of the dialogue is as good as we could expect from anybody. The problem is the dialogue itself; in his first scene, he accuses the psychic of being a Satanist, a Communist, and says "you're no better than a Jew or a nigger" - and he gets worse from there, when he not only forcibly drags his wife around by her hair, but does it through spilled paint! Don't look for subtlety here. His character is so irredeemably, aggressively vile that the viewer understands as soon as suspicion falls upon him that he can't possibly be the real villain. And so The Gift laboriously plays out as Keanu gets arrested, goes on trial (where Annie's psychic visions are given the grill), gets convicted, sent to prison, and the psychic lady starts getting new visions that tell her what would be perfectly obvious if she understood that she was in a movie. Everybody in the town seems to be a locus for violence, explosive violence, and madness (especially Giovanni Ribisi in a bizarre, unpleasant side plot as a half-nutters mechanic who's terrified of blue diamonds), but the real killer is of course the person we'd least suspect...if we didn't know this was a movie. And this revelation at the climax of the film is nowhere near as bafflingly dumb as the really out-there bit of deus ex machina which saves Annie's butt. One thing here that was entirely unexpected by me: you actually get to see Katie Holmes's boobs in this movie. I mention this in the spirit of being honest about what's redeemable here; I wouldn't rent a movie for her boobs, but I know a lot of guys who would. One of those movies I wanted to like more than I ultimately did, because it's Sam Raimi. But it's by a long shot his worst movie ever. John "Douche" Edward is even given special thanks. I can appreciate that Raimi would want to expand his repertoire beyond the genre crowd, but the channel 23 chick mystery crowd? If I'd seen this before I saw Spider-Man, I would've had a lot lower expectations for it than I did. BACK TO THE G's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE