When it comes to making supernatural thrillers, director Sam Raimi really has the gift — something he proves all over again in his new movie, fittingly titled “The Gift.” Scary, slick and sometimes poignant, it’s a modern Southern gothic piece about a small-town psychic named Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett), who finds herself ensnared in a murder investigation that could get her killed.
Even more than M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense”), Raimi (“The Evil Dead”) knows how to bring the dead alive visually, how to create a world just on the edge of the real — but also on the verge of chaos and terror. “The Gift,” from a script by Billy Bob Thornton and Thornton’s longtime writing partner, Tom Epperson (“One False Move”), won’t surprise many audi-ences. But it should hook them. Within its limits, it has rock-solid craftsmanship and a dream cast that may be better than the material. Blanchett, as Annie, believably anchors the film, and she’s backed uncommonly well by Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, Katie Holmes and Rosemary Harris. An ensemble that strong could lend power and grace to even an uninteresting tale — and “The Gift” is not at all uninteresting.
It’s a combination of lady-in-distress suspense story and murder mystery, much like “What Lies Beneath” but better written and acted. Annie is a widowed mother with three boys who lives in a small Southern town, and supports herself by telling fortunes with tarot cards. Annie also has frequent visions in which the dead channel flashbacks and secrets through her. The movie leaves little doubt that Annie’s gift of psychic foreshadowing is genuine.
Decent-hearted Annie uses her wild talent on a small scale, as an adviser-fortuneteller with a roster of sometimes hapless clients, topped by frightened and abused wife Valerie Barksdale (Swank) and Buddy Cole (Ribisi), a mentally disturbed garage mechanic and outcast who worships Annie. It’s Valerie and her philandering hubby, Donnie (Reeves), who set off the film’s horrific chain reaction. Donnie hates Annie and sees her as a witch destroying his marriage. He begins threatening and terrorizing both his wife and her psychic, while unashamedly dallying with his rich-girl mistress, Jessica (Holmes).
When Jessica suddenly disappears, her frantic father and her stunned school principal-fiance Wayne Collins (Kinnear) ask Annie to divine her whereabouts. Annie does, and the discovery and its aftermath lead her to be assaulted on all sides.
Shot partly on location in and near Savannah, Ga., “The Gift” ultimately is a mixed movie bag. It’s a Stephen King or Ray Bradbury sort of story on which has been lavished talent worthy of a William Faulkner or Katherine Anne Porter tale; at times, it suggests an inflated “Twilight Zone” episode. What sustains the movie are its basic intelligence, an extraordinary cast and the mesmerizing narrative flow. The script is an old one, which Thornton and Epperson wrote closer to their “One False Move” (1991) days — and it’s an odd mix of the cliched and the deeply personal.
Raimi’s last film was the saccharine sports drama “For Love of the Game,” with Kevin Costner pitching for a perfect game in a grossly imperfect movie. Spooks, visions, walking dead and all, “The Gift” makes a lot more sense, and credit for a lot of that is due to Blanchett, the excellent Australian actress who was Oscar-nominated for playing the Queen in 1998’s “Elizabeth.” Blanchett is a radiantly intelligent performer; she gives Annie not only a good Southern accent but also the brainy wholesomeness, natural grace and fearsome stubbornness she needs to carry us through this scare-ride.
So good is Blanchett, she’s almost able to override “The Gift’s” implausibility. And her fellow actors are fine as well. Ribisi is hampered by the script’s excesses, but, at the right moments, he all but wrings your heart. Reeves is bone-chillingly effective here as cheating, wife-beating Donnie.
Holmes and Kinnear are a very good, mismatched couple: She’s mean as hell; he’s loose as ashes. And any movie that has a cameo for Harris, who was so moving as longtime rebel Valerie Sonnenschein in “Sunshine,” really has an embarrassment of riches.
For all its craft and achievement, “The Gift” — whose script may have needed more rewriting and deepening — is a good, minor effort; it has some real conviction, even anguish. And it has Blanchett, whose gift as an actress is sometimes transcendent.
`THE GIFT’
(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Sam Raimi; written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson; photographed by Jamie Anderson; edited by Bob Murawski, Arthur Coburn; production designed by Neil Spisak; music by Christopher Young; produced by James Jacks, Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi. A Paramount Classics release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:52. MPAA rating: R (violence, language and sexuality/nudity).
THE CAST
Annie Wilson ……………. Cate Blanchett
Buddy Cole ……………… Giovanni Ribisi
Donnie Barksdale ………… Keanu Reeves
Wayne Collins …………… Greg Kinnear
Valerie Barksdale ……….. Hilary Swank
Jessica King ……………. Katie Holmes
