Gift rapt

Cate Blanchett shines in Sam Raimi’s thriller

By Peter Keough

*** Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson. With Cate Blanchett, Katie Holmes, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, Michael Jeter, J.K. Simmons, Gary Cole, and Rosemary Harris. A Paramount Classics release. At the Maine Mall, the Lilac Mall, Newington, and Salisbury.

WITCH HUNT: Keanu Reeves tries to throw a scare into Cate Blanchett.

Saintliness, not sex appeal, is the toughest quality for any actor to project. The biggest mistake is assuming the two are mutually exclusive. Cate Blanchett, perhaps the best actress of her generation, has no such misconception. She combines sanctity and eroticism in a radiant performance that redeems Sam Raimi’s The Gift from mere formulaic exercise. Written by Billy Bob Thornton (with Tom Epperson, with whom he wrote the terrific One False Move), and featuring a heroine based on Thornton’s stalwart, psychic mom, the script is surprisingly perfunctory, and Raimi’s direction after the searing austerity of A Simple Plan is disappointingly uninspired. Blanchett, though, and most of the cast make this a Gift worth unwrapping.

She plays Annie Wilson, a single mother (her husband died in an explosion — so much for the benefits of predicting the future) in rural Georgia with three kids and the gift of prophecy. This being contemporary America, she uses her talent for making ends meet, telling the fortunes (using cards that look both generic and idiosyncratic, like the movie) of locals for money and more important advising them how to improve and empower their lives. That makes for some tense moments, as what she uncovers often isn’t pretty and threatens to shatter the town’s sleepy gentility.

Take her client Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank dolled up in a 180-degree turn from her Oscar-winning role in Boys Don’t Cry, and looking this time like a drag queen). The cards don’t tell Annie as much as the bruises on Valerie’s face (poor Swank — it doesn’t matter what gender she assumes, she still gets beaten up), and she gingerly advises Valerie to dump her brutish, two-timing redneck husband Donnie (a genuinely scary Keanu Reeves). Or poor Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi, out of control in a riff on Thornton’s Sling Blade role), the town mechanic and a gibbering mass of self-loathing and violent eruptions directed mostly at himself. Annie doesn’t need much help from the spirit world to recognize signs of grotesque abuse, and her words of comfort and guidance are like cool, compassionate hands binding a wound.

Such good intentions invariably backfire. Donnie invades her home and threatens to burn her as a meddlesome witch; Buddy gets out a gas can and attempts to incinerate the past. Life doesn’t get any easier when her second sight kicks in for real, giving her glimpses of a gruesome fate for Jessica King (Katie Holmes), the flirty fiancée of local school principal Wayne Collins (Greg Kinnear) — visions that entangle Annie in the police investigation when King disappears.

At this point The Gift deteriorates into a standard whodunit with supernatural overtones. The character development doesn’t expand much beyond plot device; Annie’s three kids, for example, provide only a distracting footnote (the older son, presumably modeled on Thornton himself, is angry and gets into fights). And as opposed to what he did in A Simple Plan, Raimi here shows little regard for setting except as a tool for sometimes gratuitous thrills and suspense. Although Annie’s toy-cluttered ramshackle home sinks into shadows and phantasms to creepy effect, and drowned corpses are seen dreamily floating in formerly friendly trees, in the end Raimi falls back on hoary horror clichés. The Gift gives us tired run-throughs of the same premise we’ve seen in films from Eyes of Laura Mars to the more recent Stir of Echoes and What Lies Beneath.

Blanchett, though, seems to have more elevated fare in mind, such as Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. To Falconetti’s aura of non-comprehension and utter conviction, she adds a spiritual and physical charisma, bringing to life a woman on trial for being true to what her soul has revealed to her, little though she might understand how or why. The film, too, at its best transcends mumbo-jumbo and touches on the theme of extraordinary women uncovering the corruption of their community and consequently serving as scapegoats, a theme adumbrated by a number of recent movies (including The House of Mirth). None, though, shows the gift that Blanchett does for making such martyrdom not only believable, but sexy as well.