It’s
not often that I get to see a Lifetime Network Movie on the big screen, yet the
director of the last two The Amazing
Spider Man movies and (500) Days of
Summer has concocted quite the honey
saccharine jelly doughnut with his latest film, Gifted. Combining the child
prodigy setup of Little Man Tate with
the custody battles of Kramer vs. Kramer,
you have a rough idea of the heartstring tugging and cutesy schmaltz ahead of
you. For the most part it works when we
simply don’t care that we’re being jerked around.
Concerning
a 7 year old mathematical genius named Mary Adler (McKenna Grace) living with
her uncle Frank (Chris Evans) who inevitably wows and raises the eyebrows of
her teacher Bonnie (Jenny Slate), the film initially begins with the child
prodigy showing up her fellow adults before garnering the unwanted attention of
grandma Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), a Cruella de Vil archetype that would make
Walt Disney Villianesses blush. Soon the
film boils down to a courtroom custody battle we’ve seen one too many times
before with the, by now, usual contrivances including but not limited to saving
the day by rescuing the family cat.
If
I’ve made this overt melodramatic attempt at tear jerking sound a bit silly, it
probably is. And yet the cast, notably
Grace and Evans, act the Hell out of it and keep it just on this side of the
tracks. Grace comes across as our new
Dakota Fanning, but she does a well enough job selling the child looking down
on her intellectually inferior adults. Evans,
fresh off of Captain America, does a
decent job as the average everyman working odd boat repair jobs with no health
insurance but more love for his niece Mary than her grandmother ever
could. Also solid is Jenny Slate as the plucky
teacher who quickly picks up on Mary’s superior intellect.
One
of the film’s virtues is the earnestness of the theme, suggesting that child
geniuses should be able to grow up like normal kids too with friends and family
as opposed to endless textbook studies and increasing alienation. It’s only when the evil grandmother Evelyn
shows up and the courtroom battle begins that it starts to echo the cartoonish
stereotypes I thought I’d only ever see in a film directed by Clint Eastwood. It didn’t help that this even featured a
scene that could comparatively suck the melodrama dry from the father-daughter
separation in Interstellar.
 |
| MMMMM. Did someone say sammiches? |
Yes
the acting is good but we’ve seen this story to death and the Disney Villain
grandmother made the conflict difficult to take seriously. I’m of two minds about this one because while
the performances hold this pastiche together, I was consciously aware the whole
time of the movie’s attempts to elicit an emotion from me. There are movies that have a natural ability
to make you laugh or cry, and then there are ones that simply try too damn hard
to get something, anything, out of the viewer.
Somewhere in Gifted is a
decent two hours, if only those corny contrivances didn’t keep getting in the
way of things.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki