Just watched The Gift the other night. A decent thriller that uses some of the same atmospherics (and SFX) from recent horror films. Cate Blanchett (good as usual) plays a down-on-her-luck southern widow who ekes out a living telling fortunes and acting as a penny-ante psychotherapist for her small-town neighbors, and who finds herself caught up in the investigation of the murder of the sluttish daughter of a local bigwig. Pretty good script by Billy Bob Thornton, and directed by Sam Raimi in his continuing attempt to get away from the flashy camera work that had been his trademark earlier on.
Giovanni Ribisi also is good as a pathetic mechanic who is kept alive only by Blanchett’s tender mercies and her urging him to find the source of his desperation. A quick, maybe awkward, digression reveals that he was abused by his father. He takes revenge, and winds up, seemingly no better off, in jail for attempted murder.
Meanwhile, in one of those coincidences that logicians loathe (and that drag down scripts) Blanchett, using her gift (get it?), finds out who killed the bigwig’s daughter right at the same time the killer figures out she knows. He goes after her, but who should turn up but Ribisi to rescue her! This despite his actually being dead, having committed suicide in jail the evening before.
This preternatural rescue might just have been in Cate’s mind if she were not carrying proof of the mechanic’s intervention, a hanky that she had earlier given him, and that he subsequently gave back to her, as a comfort after she was attacked and rescued. Well, I can see why the movie makers included the hanky. The story may posit access to the supernatural, but its conclusion is backed with solid, empirical, washable evidence.
