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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Movie: Gifted
Director: Marc Webb
Starring: Chris Evans, Octavia Spencer, Lindsay Duncan, Jenny Slate, Mckenna Grace
Available on: Amazon Video and iTunes
Movies about gifted children always tend up trying to thread an impossible needle, don’t they? The push/pull between the desires to nurture a child’s gifts and help them reach their full potential in spite of their obstacles versus the desire to let a child be a child before so much pressure and responsibility is placed upon them. The best of these movies — a Searching for Bobby Fischer, say — leave the audience with a bit of ambivalence but overall draws its characters with a specificity that lets you understand the multiple points-of-view at play.
Gifted, the latest film from 500 Days of Summer and Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb, is the latest film to attempt to balance these scales. We’re introduced to 7-year-old Mary (Grace), who is proficient at math far beyond her (or any of our) age range but who is also something of a holy terror, half-precocious, half-pissy. She’s living under the guardianship of her uncle Frank (Evans), the kind of only-in-the-movies character who dresses blue-collar (though no flannel in the world could hide that chiseled Captain America chest), is smarter than anyone gives him credit for, and because he gets the benefit of a film script, gets to be always right about everything. After Mary’s schoolteacher (Slate) makes note of Mary’s gift for math, Frank demurs any offers to put her in a school for gifted children, because he’s adamant about her having a “normal” childhood.
There is, of course, a reason Frank takes this so seriously. Mary’s mother was also a math genius, who spent most of her life working to solve one of the great unsolvable mathematical problems, and then six months after giving birth to Mary, she killed herself. With the father not in the picture, Frank stepped in to take guardianship and tried very hard to keep Mary’s life away from the math-genius fast track. Enter Evelyn, Frank’s mother and Mary’s grandmother and very British, played by the wonderful Lindsay Duncan with a performance that is better than the role deserves. Maybe that’s why my sympathies went so hard in Evelyn’s direction. She and Frank have a longstanding rift, borne of a lifetime of resentments that were probably justified. Evelyn pushed Mary’s mother relentlessly towards math-genius-ness, and in Frank’s view it drove her to madness/suicide. So Evelyn is the wicked witch.
That said, Duncan’s a strong enough performer to bring dimension to her character by force if she needs to. She’s actually rather funny in her fish-out-of-water-ness, and Tom Flynn’s script gives her a couple scenes where we find out more about her. In one, she shows Mary a photo album of her younger years as a promising mathematician (a path that got diverted when she got married). Still, this only makes it all the more frustrating when the movie stacks the deck against her in its later going, piling on in favor of Frank and even his neighbor Roberta (Spencer), who may well be the most inexplicable character I’ve seen in a film in a long time. It’s like they wrote the standard neighbor babysitter character, then realized they could get Octavia Spencer for the role, so they had to write her two scenes where she gets demonstrative and territorial about Mary’s care.
Gifted is a movie that has its moments. Evans, Duncan, and Jenny Slate are all giving great performances. And it’s probably to the film’s credit that it often seems so frustrating, giving you a sense of the real stakes in such a matter where nobody is exactly right. Of course, the conclusion to the film — a series of events that range from preposterous to cruel to tidy — once again makes you wonder whether the filmmakers have any kind of ambivalence towards the Frank character at all. True, he’s played by Captain America, but there’s no denying that Gifted is a better movie if it let its hunk of a hero be wrong a little bit more.
