Best Keanu: “I’m guilty of cheating on my wife. Of being a bad husband, a bad Christian.”

In The Gift, Cate Blanchett plays Annie, a psychic, and Keanu Reeves plays Donnie, a domestic abuser. Or, to put a finer point on it, as the movie does, a wife beater. He’s menacing, but Annie tells his wife he’s not crazy — just a redneck, and she should leave him. Eventually, Annie’s assessment is proven correct, but she fails to see the far more sinister forces at work among the people in her small town.

By the film’s last half hour or so, I wanted Annie to grab her kids and flee. Just get out of this town, Annie — there’s so much violence that lurks beneath the surface. Nothing about your gift obligates you to stay, and there’s nothing about your gift that offers you any sort of protection.

That point — the disconnect between what others expect from her gift and what it actually amounts to — is the compelling part of the story. It gets oddly muddled as the movie goes on, so that Annie changes from a woman in a sort of peaceful reverie divorced from her client’s problems to being at the center of their chaotic vortex.

At times, The Gift feels like an interesting story about an everyday woman with an intuitive ability that’s had a heavier story about a murder clumsily placed on top of it. Annie suddenly becomes witness to people’s darker tendencies, because they at once fear and trust her abilities, or what they perceive them to be.

There was just a touch too much darkness in the The Gift for me to ultimately buy it as a viewer. To make the point, I suppose, that everyone is a suspect, the movie brings violence out of many spaces. The idea is to make you question, perhaps, who’s really a threat — to Annie, or to anyone else, because at least one person reveals themself to be very dangerous to others but a protective force for her.

In an early scene, Annie takes a truck ride with Buddy, a local mechanic, who has a sudden shift in personality that almost anyone would perceive as threatening. Annie, however, stays in the truck and extends her arm on the seat behind him. It’s a stark contrast to the scene that follows, when Donnie arrives at her door and she refuses to unlatch the chain, her fear palpable when she’s finally forced to let him in and he verbally and physically threatens her and her children.

At this moment, you assume Annie’s intuition gives her knowledge of who can — or more precisely, will — harm her, and who won’t. She’s mostly right when it comes to her own safety, but she can’t really predict how that translates to others, so the result is that, in the world of The Gift, violence is everywhere. You can argue whether some of the violence is justified, or perhaps more fittingly, whether it could have been stopped if the right rescue mechanisms had been in place years before.

I like this idea, that people are not universally bad or good. A sinister force to one person can be an ally to another, because that can sometimes be the nature of a very brutal human world. But I hesitate to give The Gift that much credit in assuming that’s where it was going all along.

In the beginning, The Gift feels like it has a nice narrative arc, but so many things are lost along the way — Annie is a widow and one of her three sons has been getting into fights at school, something she never addresses with him, for example — that I’d rather just conclude that the dark things that come to the surface in the movie are for the sake of the whodunit, and not to address any deeper human questions.

Keanu Reeves is very good as a bad guy. But that’s a bit of a miscue as well — because yes, Donnie is a deplorable human. But the audience has to know right away that he’s not guilty of this murder, a feat achieved with an easy reversion back to not-so-threatening Keanu. So although I had found it tough to imagine how he would work in this role, after seeing the film, I get it.

But I liked this film. I did. I wanted more Cate Blanchett in her safe space doing readings, and less of her in a state of fear. But perhaps this means I wasn’t a fan of the story, even if I found many of the pieces were what I might otherwise enjoy.

March 2022