Sam Raimi's The Gift: What Went Wrong?

On paper, it sounds promising, or, at the very least, interesting: a Southern Gothic mystery with a cast of Oscar nominees (and one winner), written by the folks responsible for One False Move, and directed by Sam Raimi, known primarily as a purveyor of highly polished, enthusiastic schlock, but whose brutal, austere A Simple Plan was one of the more disturbing commercial thrillers of recent years. (I just watched it again last month, and still can't find a single scene or image that doesn't pull its dramatic weight.) There's even a risky performance by Zen hunk Keanu Reeves as a scummy, wifebeating villain.

Those are the ingredients of The Gift, a convoluted, supernaturally inflected scare job that aims to outguess and outmaneuver even the most proficient plot-guessers in the audience. But the various pieces don't come together; in fact, they often seem to be pieces of several different puzzles. The result is a disaster from which all the participants will be lucky to escape. To quote an old Hollywood adage, it's a deal memo rather than a movie. Which is too bad, because pretty much everyone involved in the picture seems to have gotten into it hoping to stretch in fresh directions.

The Gift star Cate Blanchett plays the introverted heroine, Annie Wilson, a professional psychic and grieving, widowed mother who gets entangled in a bloody murder trial in her Georgia burg. She's an Australian who got an Oscar nomination for playing the title role in Elizabeth and runs the risk of being typecast in period pieces, and you can see how she probably thought a role like this might expand the industry's view of her potential. Hilary Swank, who got her own statuette for Boys Don't Cry, gets to disappear into a very different kind of working-class Southern character, and this one is supporting: she's Valerie Barksdale, a client of Annie's who's being beaten by her no-good husband Donnie, who's not just a thug, but also a Satanist. Katie Holmes gets to sashay around as the town tramp and doff her top in the name of art (cue a million 14-year-old boys chanting, "Woo-hooo!"); Greg Kinnear, Oscar-nominated for As Good as It Gets, plays Holmes' sweet-natured doormat of a fiance, the principal of the school Annie's sons attend.

What went wrong? Well, if a house is so crooked it's about to fall over, the first place to look is the foundation?and tellingly, the screenplay is the only major aspect of the film where the participants could be called Usual Suspects. Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, whose breakthrough as screenwriters came 10 years ago with the drum-tight thriller One False Move, specialize in Southern stories?particularly Southern Gothic stories. The terrain is familiar not just to fans of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and company, but also to the world's moviegoers, who are used to seeing the South depicted as a festering hellhole of loose women, ignorant men, rampant racism, incest, voodoo and Lord knows what else. Thornton and Epperson have done yeoman's work reinterpreting and exploring this pop culture territory; One False Move, together with A Family Thing and Thornton's redneck Orson Welles breakout, Sling Blade, infused familiar tales of filial and geographical obligation with quirky characterizations and a deep, sincere awareness of the horror wrought by racism, sexism and domestic abuse.

None of that sensitivity is apparent in The Gift, a supposed labor of love that plays like a cynical quickie. The script is two-dimensional and plotted with an arbitrariness that suggests a Zucker-Abrams-Zucker sendup of Southern Gothic movies: if you didn't know it was written recently and produced on the cheap, you'd swear it was written long ago in some lingering stage of amateurism and dusted off years later for a quick Hollywood buck.

The central plotline sees Holmes' tramp murdered and Donnie placed on trial, with Annie serving as star witness because her psychic visions located the body. It's the most absurd, legally asinine and comical movie trial since the pun-ridden courtroom sendup in The Kentucky Fried Movie, which saw a lawyer waving a dildo in a witness' face and barking, "Are you aware of the penal code in this state?" To make matters worse, if you've ever seen a movie, you know in your bones that Donnie couldn't possibly be the culprit, because (1) this is a whodunit, and Donnie is the most overtly nasty character in the film, breaking into the heroine's home and threatening to kill her and her kids if she doesn't stop advising Valerie to leave him, and (2) Donnie is convicted of murder about 70 minutes into the film, and what's going to come after that, 50 minutes of denouement?

Annie's character is so opaque it's impossible to get a handle on what drives her; after half an hour of emotional inertia, you figure out she's a human wheelhouse through which the assorted troubled supporting characters pass in and out?sort of like a tarot-card-wielding, spooky-vision-afflicted version of a shrink or a private detective, the kind of character who sits in one location and waits for problems to waltz in and ask to be solved.

There's another weird, ill-conceived supporting character in Annie's life: a mentally retarded mechanic named Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi), who adores her and her children and would do anything to protect her. If you've seen any of the movies Thornton and/or Epperson worked on during the past decade, you instantly recognize the roots of this stammering loner who's alternately condescended to and despised by the townsfolk: he's the Boo Radley character from To Kill a Mockingbird, an albino emblem of racial unease whose reputation as a bogeyman disguises a fine, strong heart. The screenwriters are obsessed with Radley, to the point where somebody needs to hose them down; they include a Radley character in every script they churn out?Karl in Sling Blade is a primary example?using him as a symbol of ignorance that must be vanquished by understanding, empathy that's stunted by hostility, prejudice that must be conquered by education, and whatever else the movie seems to need.

Mostly, though, Boo Radley is a plot device that conveniently solves irresolvable problems. Though I despised The Gift, I'll be a sport and refuse to reveal Buddy's role in wrapping up the ridiculously complex and unbelievable story. Suffice to say that any claims of liberal humanist sensitivity on the filmmakers' parts are undermined by the grotesque way Buddy is made up and photographed, as well as by Ribisi's sickly, trembling, wild-eyed, gesticulating performance. His symbolic value as an unjustly despised outcast is further damaged by the story's absence of people of color. Apparently, The Gift is set in one of the few mostly white small towns left in the Deep South; you halfway expect Sheriff Andy or the Hazzard boys to toodle into the frame and say howdy.

The real tragedy of The Gift goes beyond its ineptitude as both thriller and drama. What really disturbs me is the fact that so many talented people hopped on board the project because they apparently believed it was something really special. The film's budget is estimated at around $10 million, a remarkably small sum considering the asking price of Raimi, the screenwriters and the cast; everyone involved must have cut their price in the name of art. But there's no art to be found, only contrivance. And the result of all this goodwill, all this hard work, all this meticulously assembled creative optimism, is a movie that plays like a parody of a parody of its betters. Films like The Gift make it harder for successful people to make art at the Hollywood level and get it distributed to a wide audience; anybody who pays money to see it will feel like poor Scout in that scene from To Kill a Mockingbird where she visits the tree where Boo Radley leaves gifts and finds the hole plastered over with cement.