The Gift

THE GIFT

Rating: C

Cate Blanchett is the widowed mother of three youngsters living in poor southern Bayou country. To earn the family's butter and egg money, she performs psychic card readings for the locals. Among her clients is a battered neighborhood woman (Hilary Swank), whose drinking, womanizing, unshaven lout of a husband (Keanu Reeves) has a poorly controlled violent streak. Matters come to a head when the fiancée of the local school principal (Greg Kinnear) disappears, and Blanchett begins having visions of the woman lying dead in a body of water.

This film will convince you of your own psychic powers. You'll find yourself rightly anticipating every plot twist and turn long before it happens onscreen, and you'll have all the red herrings cast aside and the murderer pegged before you're halfway through your raspberry icee. And if that's not psychic ability, then it can only be because the plot is so hackneyed, clichéd, pedestrian, predictable, and downright unoriginal. But I prefer to think I have psychic abilities.

Speaking of red herrings, didja ever notice how every second-rate murderer-on-the-loose film always has some wacko character who's paraded in front of us as a possible suspect, but whom you just know isn't the real killer? Usually, he's the school janitor or something similar. Well, here's where The Gift displays its originality. The wacko (Giovanni Ribisi) most certainly is not the school janitor, he's the local tow truck driver. Okay, maybe that's not so original, but Ribisi should be commended anyway. Every scene he's in is weirder and more pointless than the one before it. Considering his first scene with Blanchett inside his truck is downright bizarre, that's some kind of achievement.

The cards Blanchett "reads" aren't the run-of-the-mill tarot cards favored by legitimate psychics everywhere. Instead, she uses those cards with symbols such as circles, squares, stars, and wavy lines on a white background. Funny thing is, these "Zener cards" were invented by a professor at Duke University to test for the existence of psychic abilities (e.g., someone selects a card from the deck and concentrates on it, and the "psychic" tries to visualize which symbol was selected) and have never had any association with foretelling the future. So whoever thought to use these cards for the film knew they were linked somehow with psychic abilities, but totally misunderstood the connection. Maybe it's a small point, but at the same time it reveals a general careless attitude of the filmmakers for their subject matter. Plus, reading the future by looking at a picture of wavy lines is just plain stupid.

There's a bathtub scene in here which is a direct rip-off of What Lies Beneath. (Technically, you could make a convincing argument that the entire movie is a rip-off of What Lies Beneath, but I'm trying to be charitable here.) This unfortunately violates the Net-Monster First Rule of Moviemaking®: If you're going to blatantly steal from a film, at least blatantly steal from a good film. No one ever became a champion by imitating the losers. Of course, dead bodies in the bathtub go all the way back to The Shining and before (remember The Tingler?), meaning there wasn't anything particularly original about What Lies Beneath either. But I'm sure you already knew that.

To be fair, some of the psychic episodes Blanchett experiences succeed in having an eerie, ethereal quality to them. Along with some good performances by Blanchett, Kinnear, and even Reeves, they're the saving grace of this film. But they'll look just as good if you wait to see them on DVD.