It’s Thanksgiving Monday for the Canadians, and Day 14 for The Kasturi/Files here at Speculative Chic! Welcome back, and happy turkey day. We have just the thing for you to read now that you’re a bloated stupor and need a bit of a pick-me-up. What better than to argue about films, booze and books? Join us — Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files — for some more on-screen ogling and on-line conversation.
Gemma: 2000 was a pretty good year for American supernatural thrillers, apparently — because right around the very same time that Robert Zemeckis came out with What Lies Beneath, a pre-Spider-Man Sam Raimi came out with The Gift. Starring Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves and Katie Holmes, the film was set in Brixton, Georgia, written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, and based on the alleged psychic experiences of Thornton’s mother.
Sandra: I know everyone loves Raimi’s Evil Dead movies, and I do too, but The Gift is probably my favorite Raimi movie, with its genuine chills and Southern Gothic languor and splendor. Plus it has a great soundtrack. All that wonderful fiddling, and artists like Neko Case doing their damn fine thing. Oh, and, er, SPOILERS ahead. Oh, and this is not to be confused with The Gift starring Jason Bateman (2015, directed by Joel Edgerton), which is also terrific.
Gemma: One of my formative influences is Michael McDowell, these days mainly remembered as the screenwriter of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, but who also came out with a series of Southern Gothics during the salad days of the 1980s horror boom. The Amulet, Cold Moon Over Babylon, The Elementals, Blackwater . . . they’re all incredibly good, packed full of rural, small-town realism and poetry admixed, not to mention scary as all hell on top of it.
Sandra: The Elementals does on the page what Midsommar and The Ruins do on-screen: give you horror set in a sunny, burning-bright locale that still irradiates you with a terrible sense of creep. The Gift is a slow-burn movie that follows a meandering road, but it does that on purpose. You need to settle in and let it infuse you with its atmosphere and characters, its top-notch acting and storytelling. I am tired of people complaining “it took too long to get to the island” and who want everything instantly. I know it’s just a symptom of our times, but take a chance with this movie — you won’t regret it.
Gemma: And this film, at its best, reminds me of all of those McDowell books: the Everybody-Knows-Everybody (And Their Mom, Dad, Grandparents, Great-Great-Grandparents) insularity, the generational patterns of sorrow and endurance, natural beauty and fecund, swamp life juxtaposed with a guilty legacy of bone-deep toil, poverty, hellfire-and-damnation religious fervor, racism — always present, even if almost all the characters shown onscreen are white — and pure, mean narrow-mindedness of every sort. Yet The Gift nevertheless somehow manages to be almost unbearably kind at times, mostly because of the simple human empathy channeled through Annie Wilson, Blanchett’s character.
Widowed a year ago when her husband died in a factory accident, Annie supplements her social security money by reading cards for various townspeople, who then provide “donations” in return. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes barter; a lady who lives nearby babysits Annie’s three sons, for example, while mechanic Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi) does work on her car for free. As for what Annie gives them, in return . . .
For all that she uses Zener cards (actually invented to measure psychic ability, not help it along) to make her predictions — the creepiest use of which has to be when an inquiry as to where someone might be just results in the water card being laid down, three times in a row — Annie gets just as much information out of a series of softly probing questions, her knowledge of circumstance and likelihood, her inherent ability to reckon what personal doubts and fears her clients might most want to hide from themselves, to distract themselves from dealing with.
Sandra: That was the eeriest scene for me too — when she turns those three “wavy lines” cards over; you know that the missing Jessica King’s body is in the water. I love watching Blanchett’s face as Annie Wilson in those moments. Her concern, her anxiety for the people of her town, her own fears and financial insecurity playing underneath. Her sincere wish to do good, even as she’s suffering terrible grief and loss, and even as she’s not sure she can help, especially someone as troubled and possibly actually mentally ill (not to mention violent) as Ribisi’s Buddy.
Gemma: “He took something away from you when you were a kid,” Annie tells Buddy, who’s puzzled by the anger and fear he associates with his supposedly wonderful father. “Does that make sense? Well, you gotta do some thinkin’ ’bout it on your own.” Her oldest son, Mike, points out that while it seems she has “time for a lot of strangers” she can barely stand to talk about his father, to which she snaps: “They’re not strangers! They put food on our table.” Her grief is intense but held inside, so she can be there for everyone else. She’s a bit of a hedge psychiatrist, or an unofficial social worker. Part of her job is about allowing people to talk and remembering what they talk about; part of it’s giving good, practical advice without seeming like you’re passing judgement — go to the doctor about that bleeding, think hard about why something makes you so upset. But . . . then there’s that other part, the part that shows itself to Annie in visions, whether by day or night.
The way Raimi presents the numinous is through the everyday, but sharpened — a sudden silence or a rush of wind, the drop of a pencil into water that shouldn’t be there next to a pair of muddy bare feet, some of the most physically palpable ghosts I’ve seen outside of Asia. The fluttering buzz of cicadas is shorthand for danger; the scrim of a hung sheet becomes the veil between worlds, as a smiling old woman with a basket full of persimmons appears in Annie’s back yard. “Granny, what are you doing here?” she asks. “Oh, it ain’t far to walk . . . but there’s a storm comin’.” And the sky above becomes troubled, dark, inescapable.
Sandra: You know, it’s funny. Or not so funny. I remember when I saw The Gift the first time in 2000, that scene with Annie’s dead grandmother inserting herself into the world of the living to warn her granddaughter . . . I got a full-body chill after watching that. “There’s a storm comin’.” I couldn’t stop thinking about that line, and feeling a terrible sense of foreboding that in fact it wasn’t just a line, that it was a warning with real-world implications. I was spooked for months on end. Not kidding. Yet it’s not a scary scene — it’s a nice old lady (Rosemary Harris) talking to someone she loves, in the sunlight, hanging out laundry. The chill comes (at first) just from the look on Cate Blanchett’s face — it’s all reaction — her grandmother’s not supposed to be there. Blanchett allows a mixture of emotions to move over her face: fear in the face of the unknown, the supernatural; pure love and longing for her grandmother; a sense of wonder at what she’s experiencing; the sense of loss for someone dead; foreboding from the warning. It’s all there. And how dreadful to know there’s a storm coming and to be completely helpless to prevent it.
Gemma: The Gift’s plot really gets going when Annie runs afoul of local “high-strung” “ladies’ man” Donnie Barksdale (Reeves), whose abused wife Valerie (Hilary Swank) is one of her most loyal clients; Annie keeps telling her to leave Donnie, and even though Valerie never does, Donnie’s had enough of it. Weirdly courtly and horribly volatile, capable of deliberate cruelty on a Tennessee Williams scale, Donnie calls Annie “no better than a Jew or an [n-word],” a Satanist, a con artist. He stops one of her kids on the road and tells him she’s a witch who’s going to get her house burned down, sparking a confrontation with Buddy that only ends when Donnie claps a gun to his head and Buddy screams: “GO ON AND SHOOT ME, MOTHERFUCKER!” causing Donnie to roar off in his truck. The cops (squirrel-hunting good-old-boy buddies of Donnie’s) won’t do anything, calling it a domestic matter between a man and his wife, so stay out of it.
Sandra: For me, Keanu Reeves was a revelation. He was a Hollywood fixture back in 2000 and well-known for being an amiable doofus in things like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and then of course as an action hero in the Speed movies. But he shot to stratospheric fame the previous year for The Matrix, which, while adored by audiences everywhere, still had people making fun of him for his acting chops and citing lines like “Whoa,” and “I know Kung Fu,” to gently mock Reeves’s ability. When I first saw The Gift, quite honestly, I wasn’t paying too much attention to who the cast was, and I didn’t even notice his name in the opening credits. So, when I watched the scene when he shows up at Cate Blanchett’s door, a looming, bearded presence that goes from zero to ninety in a heartbeat and makes your heart race (in a bad way) every minute he’s onscreen from sheer volatile tension — I confess I didn’t even recognize him. Reeves plays Donnie Barksdale as a man so unpredictable that you’re nervous for everyone around him, and furious on behalf of those whose lives he touches in terrible ways. He’s the worst kind of bully — not one who backs down when you finally stand up to him, but one who escalates into the stratosphere instantly, with potentially lethal results. I couldn’t stop looking at Reeves every time he was onscreen, even though it was horribly uncomfortable to do so. Which led me to ask: Why doesn’t anyone else give Keanu Reeves anything to do, if he can pull off a performance like this? Don’t get me wrong, I loved The Matrix and a lot of his other movies, but it’s like Sam Raimi coaxed something else entirely out of him for The Gift — and in what is really quite a small role. Reeves has been typecast as a handsome action hero, but not someone to take too seriously (a trap Brad Pitt had fallen into as well, until Twelve Monkeys). I just wish he’d do more of this weird kind of shit that allowed him to really show his acting chops. Even though, yeah, I did like John Wick. Anyway. Back to what we’re actually talking about!
Gemma: Soon enough, however, Annie has what seems like a perfect opportunity to get Donnie out of her life for good: Flighty rich girl Jessica King (Holmes), fiancée of the same nice school guidance counsellor (Greg Kinnear) who’s been bonding with Annie over Mike’s behavior problems, suddenly disappears. From her sessions with Valerie and her previous observation of Jessica’s hypersexual behavior with . . . well, pretty much every man in town (including her Daddy) besides her husband-to-be, Annie’s already fairly sure that Jessica’s Donnie’s side-piece. So after Sheriff Pearl Johnson (J.K. Simmons, at his folksiest and most skeptical) brings Mr. King over to get a not particularly useful reading about his daughter’s whereabouts, she dreams about it later: walking through the mangrove swamp, its flowers black with decay; a ghostly man playing the fiddle at horridly high speed [Danny Elfman! —SK]; then a visit with her own long-dead dog, interrupted when she glances up to be confronted with Jessica’s drowned and dripping body floating around in the tree above her, one eye swollen black, the same way Annie’s seen Valerie’s eye ten times or more. This dream leads Johnson to Jessica’s body, sunk deep in a pond on Donnie Barksdale’s property. How could it possibly not be him who killed her?
Sandra: Much like in What Lies Beneath, it’s another clever game of bait and switch! Really, that would have worked as a title for The Gift just as well.
Gemma: In another movie, or an episode of The Ghost Whisperer, this would be where things end. But it isn’t. Is it too reductionist to say that the specter lurking behind almost everyone whose troubles Annie comes into contact with appears to be that of child abuse? Something made Jessica King think she needed to lovelessly screw anything in pants that came near her, even though it doesn’t even vaguely seem to have made her happy; we eventually do learn the terrible secret of that “blue diamond” Buddy keeps talking about, and worrying he’ll die if he looks at it while thinking negative thoughts — the source of all his aimless rage. Hell, even Donnie probably is the way he is because of abuse, considering both how ridiculously beautiful Keanu Reeves can’t help but be and the utter sneering contempt Donnie displays towards everyone who has the bad taste to be attracted to him.
Sandra: Again — Keanu Reeves! Just astonishing.
Gemma: Whether you believe in Annie’s powers or not, The Gift’s clearest cultural legacy lies in showing just how hard she works for her bits of recompense — how what she does is sometimes unrewarding and literally open to interpretation, yet ultimately emotion-driven, equal balm for both souls on either end of the transaction. The resolution of Buddy’s subplot, which seemed crazily overblown to me back when I first reviewed this, now rings as a necessary moment for Annie to pass through on her way to the whole truth, not just fragments of it: it shows her how easily she can misinterpret her own visions when she’s distracted herself, either by her fear of Donnie or . . . other things. “All I know is the wrong man’s in jail,” she tells the public prosecutor she wants to re-open Jessica’s case, “and I helped put him there. And I don’t care how awful he is, I can’t live with that.” This is a complicated film full of complicated people, and Raimi — with help from Thornton, as well as a ridiculously talented cast — somehow manages to do his best by all of them. Do yourself a favor and either revisit it or see it for the first time, if you haven’t before; it’s a gift (ha ha) that keeps on giving.
Sandra: Like with What Lies Beneath, The Gift covers similar themes: love, loss, family, bad marriages, secrets. And it also offers up the reveal of the Good Guy being the killer. Greg Kinnear’s earnestness and sincere, liquid eyes — “I’m not a bad man!” — just mask a repressed nature and jealous streak, coupled with an inability to cope with the realities of what’s going on under his nose. He’s so nice, but even as he’s looking with fondness and longing into Blanchett’s eyes, denying he wants to hurt her, you can see him make the active decision to kill. Where The Gift differs, though, is the shift in socioeconomic status of the principal characters — this is, at heart, about poor people whose financial terror resonates in other areas in their lives. And then the question arises that always must plague anyone with special powers: if you can tell the future, why aren’t you rich? Why didn’t you save your husband? Why didn’t you see the terrible storm coming?
Cocktail: Fortune Teller Cocktail
Sandra: This one has a few obscure ingredients, so a bit more complicated than some. Anyway, I’m sure if you have a couple of these, you’ll either be paralytic or for sure be able to see the future. (If you don’t want to bother, you can probably just pour a couple of fingers of bourbon in a glass with some ice and get a good ol’ southern-USA feel that way.)
Ingredients:
- 1 1⁄2 oz Suerte Blanco Tequila
- 1 oz Manzanilla sherry
- 1⁄2 oz Avèze Gentian Liqueur
- 1⁄4 oz Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur
- 1 tsp Tarragon Tincture
- Garnish: Sprig tarragon, lemon peel
Directions: Throw all the non-garnish ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice. Swizzle around and then strain tidily into a rocks glass. To garnish, cut a square of lemon peel and skewer it with a sprig of tarragon. Drink carefully.
Book Recommendations
Sandra: For a similar flavor, I’d go with Caitlin Galway’s novel Bonavere Howl (Guernica) which just came out this year. It has that same Southern Swamp Gothic feel, and another missing woman, albeit set in a different era. Lyrically written and eerie, it hooks you from page one. Self-indulgently I’d also recommend Shadows in Summerland (ChiZine) by Adrian Van Young (who lives in the most Southern Gothic city of all: New Orleans)! The book is set in the 1800s and in New England, but it’s also about fortune-telling (both real and fake), spirit photography, and talking to the dead. Oh! One more. It’s really just on theme in the sense that it involves varying kinds of ESP, but I’ll take any chance to recommend books by Daryl Gregory — in this case: Spoonbenders.
Gemma: My book rec for this one? Either Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell (available from Valancourt or Audible), McDowell’s most The Gift-like novel — particularly in terms of its small town politics, its Gothic, moonlight-saturated water imagery and its extremely inventive use of a vengeful young drowned girl’s ghost — or the book he died before finishing, later completed by Tabitha King: Candles Burning, which pits the psychically endowed daughter of a murdered man against a cabal of similarly gifted women who want to use her abilities for their own gain. It’s not as good as it would have been if he’d been able to do it himself, but much like this movie, it’s well worth your time.
Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).
I have not seen this yet, but thanks to your discussion, I really want to!
I don’t remember this movie at all and I should because I’m a fan of Billy Bob Thorton and Southern Gothic things. I really want to see it after reading this discussion.
It’s such a good movie, but of course–a slow burn. And it’s fascinating to watch all these great actors do their thing.The music is wonderful, as I said, though often low-key, so you don’t hear it. Worth buying the soundtrack!
Great soundtrack too? STOP TEMPTING ME!!!