Let’s agree on a few things before we get started. Blumhouse Productions’ films may not be flawless, but they are solidly entertaining and usually more nuanced than they have any right to be. Joel Edgerton is a great actor, but that means he is also a chameleon so I briefly confuse him with Jason Clarke, which is a grave mistake—no disrespect intended to Clarke. Apparently Edgerton is also a talented writer and director if The Gift is an accurate indication of his skills, and if I had seen it earlier, I may have seen Boy Erased in theaters or even put it in my queue, which I have now done. I’m sorry, Edgerton. I’m the problem. There are many great actors who try to make the transition to working behind the screen and fail to reach the level that they are accustomed to when acting.
In The Gift, Rebecca Hall and Jason Bateman play a married couple. They bump into the husband’s former high school acquaintance, Gordo, played by Edgerton. The husband is wary, but the wife is open to socializing with Gordo; however Gordo is a little odd. Their black neighbor keeps it simple and advises them not to hang out with Gordo, but the problem is larger than this one guy. He is just emblematic of larger problems that they have. What I adored about this movie is how I was completely absorbed by it and related to the characters as if they were real people. I’m going to spoil the movie. Don’t worry. The dog does not die, but the fish do.
Whoever cast Jason Bateman as the husband is brilliant. I instinctually didn’t trust him. His actions were always dissonant with his frank feelings. Yes, why would this guy think that you were friends after you invited him to your home, had meals with him, accepted his invitations and gifts. What a nut! On behalf of awkward people everywhere, if you don’t want to hang out with us, don’t! Don’t make polite invitations that you don’t really want me to accept. People like you make it difficult for the genuine people who have to work hard to convince me that they really want to hang out, and I’m not actually bothering them. I’m not unfriendly. I’m just tired of people treating me like a charity case and talking about me behind my back (I’m not paranoid. I have screenshots) so I stop engaging people and initiate less. I pegged him as a bully fairly early on. He was a concern troll to his wife, and I felt like he deliberately chose a woman that was bullied as a young child so he could manipulate her for fun in his spare time. He acted like her supervisor, not her husband. I noticed that his words were empowering, but in the same breath, he would pressure her to have a baby, which she clearly was not ready to do. Also corporate sarcasm guy is a shade too confident that he has the dominant upper hand over a former military guy in his own home. I’m also suspicious of men who isolate their wives-is it for work or is it deliberate? There were so many red flags, especially when his stories about Gordo kept shifting.
Rebecca Hall is one of my faves because she is a good actor, and regardless of how she actually identifies, I consider Hall as unwittingly making films diverse that may not otherwise cast a black or multiracial woman in the lead. (I’m looking at you, Woody Allen. Bwahahahahahaha!) With Hall as the wife, she brings an intelligence and vulnerability to the role that can’t be dismissed as stupid while she takes incredibly naïve actions. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but even if your walls are made of glass, you don’t have to let people in when they choose to visit you at home, especially without letting anyone know so that if you get murdered, the police at least have a lead suspect. Women, you don’t have to be available because someone wants you to be available. I know that it is hard not to be nice, but that is some gendered performance art that you’re not getting paid for.
To be clear, if I was in The Gift, it would have been a short movie because Gordo would never have accidentally heard my address at the store. I write that information down and slide the paper over to the person manning the register as if I’m making an outrageous bid that they must see to believe. While on a very basic level, I could relate to Gordo trying too hard and his general awkwardness, I never trusted his intentions EVER. He violates boundaries and cares too much about people that he has no genuine connection with. When you find out the entire back story between these men, you retroactively realize that the husband should never have allowed it to go as far as it did, and his misplaced, overinflated confidence is his doom. Anyone who would want to spend so much time with a former unprovoked tormentor either is looking for revenge or needs a therapist so he can move on and get a better life because the best case scenario was that Gordo was trying to prove that he could get people to like him that absolutely did not. Don’t waste your time on people that don’t mean you well. It is better to be alone! On a more practical note, don’t just turn up at someone’s house uninvited and expect her to rearrange her whole schedule for you. You are annoying. Should Gordo be big mad and want revenge? Yes, but wanting it and doing it are two very different things and are indicators of a healthy, human psyche versus a demented, damaged one. I mourn for the hurt child, but stay away from the adult.
The Gift is one hour forty-eight minutes long and is mostly shot from the wife’s point of view, but shifts to the husband’s after one hour sixteen minutes into the movie. I’m ambivalent about this shift. On one hand, it provides definitive confirmation that the husband is a POS. On the other hand, the film’s narrative shift slightly vindicates how both men see the wife as a battleground for their egos, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’m fine with following her as she remains clueless or perhaps earlier in the film, we needed to shift the perspective more frequently so we could thoroughly appreciate the husband’s wake up call that he isn’t winning this time. I suppose that I made peace with this ending because it does not permit us to relish revenge when it finally comes, but I do feel as if I was empathizing with the wife for the majority of the film, and by the end, I’m exiled with the husband from her life. Is this shift supposed to be a commentary about the nature of being a viewer or a spectator? Is there an element of abuse inherent in the act of watching without consent even if the characters are fictional, and you are watching a movie?
The Gift is a thriller filled with victims. I would love for everyone to see it so they could learn the warning signs of the types of people to stay away from who seem normal, but are not. I’d love to discover a psychological analysis of the movie’s characters from a professional.