The Gift (2000) Sam Raimi’s Southern Gothic is worth Unearthing

Being a Sam Raimi fan in the 1990s was a frustrating experience. His Evil Dead trilogy became more of a cult favourite with every passing year, yet his other work stubbornly failed to connect with the wider audience it deserved. To fans, he was a born entertainer with a limitless box of cinematic tricks, and he and his old friend Bruce Campbell were Spielberg and Ford for the smart-arse set. Yet Darkman, The Quick and the Dead and A Simple Plan failed to persuade the mainstream. He ended the decade directing a Kevin Costner baseball movie at the exact moment when The Postman persuaded America it’d had its fill of Kevin Costner, and this muted supernatural thriller. Then, famously, he began the next decade by delivering exactly the kind of whizz-bang blockbuster hit people had long anticipated for him with Spider-Man. Raimi’s newfound status as a herald of the superhero age has made The Gift into a bit of a footnote; this 4K Arrow restoration should prompt a reassessment.

Because The Gift, despite featuring Raimi’s future Spider-Man stars Rosemary Harris and J.K. Simmons, is far more than Raimi’s warm-up for that film. Raimi is on the cusp of something big here, but then so is everyone else: it features Cate Blanchett just before Lord of the Rings, Hilary Swank just before Boys Don’t Cry, and Keanu Reeves right at the moment when The Matrix gave him his third indelible lead role. Reeves, who had yet to become everyone’s sweetheart at this point, is the most divisive aspect of The Gift. His performance as the racist, redneck wife-beater Donnie Barksdale was mocked by some critics who thought Reeves was simply out of his depth. Viewed today, after Reeves has made a much better fist of a similarly toxic role in The Neon Demon, it’s clear that the role’s problems are at least partly down to the script. The Neon Demon allowed him to play a silently menacing villain, essentially repurposing his John Wick persona for evil. Donnie Barksdale is the kind of villain who never stops telling you how evil he is, unable to explain some scratches on his arm without gloating that he killed the cat responsible. It’s true that Reeves’s performance lacks light and shade, but since there’s no space to fill such subtleties in it’s hard to know what he could have done differently.

That script is written by Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton, the latter of whom was at a similar inflection point in his career. Thornton had broken through with his directorial debut Sling Blade, also co-written with Epperson, setting up a career as a multi-hyphenate that ended up being overshadowed by his acting successes. Rather than being an attempt at following up an indie hit with something more commercial, Thornton and Epperson actually wrote The Gift before Sling Blade. Even if Raimi is in for-hire mode, it’s worth approaching The Gift as a passion project for Thornton. He was inspired by his mother, whose claim to psychic ability was developed into Cate Blanchett’s fortune-telling heroine Annie Wilson.

Indeed, one of the things that has aged most impressively about The Gift is its depiction of relationships among women. Annie’s clairvoyancy is the heart of an underground network among the local women, a circle of mutual support and advice that rouses violent, prejudiced suspicion in the town’s menfolk. It is perhaps the only turn-of-the-millennium all-star Hollywood thriller that would make a good double-bill with Elizabeth Sankey’s recent essay film Witches, which also positions the occult as a system of female solidarity. It also has an insightful eye for the times when that solidarity breaks down. Both Swank’s abused wife Valerie and Katie Holmes’s Jessica are victimised by the local men, yet Valerie ends up resenting Jessica for her promiscuity. The lure of respectability, the need to make it clear that she’s not that kind of woman, prevents her from recognising the injustices that have been done to them both.

Not all of The Gift is similarly subtle. As with Sling Blade, Thornton and Epperson are writing Southern Gothic, a mode that requires at least a touch of excess. Southern Gothic is a form of Gothic writing that contrasts the genteel, polite, old-world pace of Deep South life with whatever lies beneath; incest, madness and murder are popular answers to that question. The Gift features plenty of all three, not least in Giovanni Ribisi’s volcanic performance as a disturbed man seeking Annie’s advice. Like a lot of Gothic literary schools, Southern Gothic has plenty of overlap with horror without fitting entirely in that genre. You wouldn’t say Southern Gothic authors like William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams were horror authors, and The Gift sometimes stumbles when it has to force this story into a horror mould. One particular jump scare involves Danny Elfman cameoing as a deranged violinist; it’s more likely to raise a laugh than a scream.

On release, this approach to horror disappointed audiences looking for the full-on gore-spraying gonzo of The Evil Dead. Yet as a Southern Gothic story The Gift is extremely successful. Michigan-born Raimi obviously has less personal investment in this genre than Thornton does, but he takes every opportunity to crank up the swampy atmosphere. (It would be nice to think that Raimi decided to place one of Annie’s visions at the top of a tree just so he could include more shots of trailing kudzu vines) Like a lot of Hollywood takes on the South, the cast is light on actual Southerners. Yet as someone who lacks the discerning ear to be distracted by accents, I found plenty of laudable performances. It’s a fine look at Blanchett at the earliest stage of her leading-lady career, and Ribisi and Swank are strong in support. Simmons is so great as a local cop that you can almost see the lightbulb going off over Raimi’s head as he realises this is his J. Jonah Jameson right here. His disappointed glance over at a near-empty box of doughnuts while he listens to Annie’s testimony manages to say volumes about her marginalisation in one delightful sight gag.

The 4K restoration allows you to see how much work Raimi and his cinematographer Jamie Anderson put into capturing the Georgia locations, and the extras are voluminous as well. Raimi, Blanchett, Reeves and Ribisi are only present in promotional featurettes from the time of the film’s release, but there is a new interview with Chelcie Ross, who has a small but unforgettable role in the film. Instead of stars, the commentaries bring in critics including Meagan Navarro, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson, cementing the sense that the time has come to take The Gift a little more seriously. There is also room for the music video to Neko Case’s ‘Furnace Room Lullaby’, which appears on the soundtrack. Included on her album of the same name, it started her journey towards being the most brilliant and acclaimed alt-country singer-songwriter of her generation. Like I said, everyone is on the cusp of something big in The Gift.

Graham’s Archive – The Gift (2000)