"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Gifted (2017, PG-13)

I wound up enjoying this film quite a bit.  Great cast, intriguing premise, and a pretty well-executed story.  It’s not without its issues, but overall, I’m in favor.

Frank has been raising his niece Mary since she was a baby, and as she prepares to enter first grade, he gets concerned.  It’s plain that Mary has inherited her late mother’s prodigy-level head for mathematics, but Frank is painfully aware of how troubled his sister was and the effect that being aggressively pushed toward intellectual greatness had on her, and he’s determined that Mary not be forced down the same path.  Unfortunately, her can’t-turn-it-off brilliance is hard to hide from her new teacher and classmates, and before long, her future is being argued in court via a custody battle between Frank and Mary’s grandmother Evelyn.

While I can’t say I have much experience with child prodigies, Mary’s portrayal feels very real to me.  Lots of little details seem to ring true:  she figures without being a human computer, she thinks her intelligence gives her greater license to do what she likes, her boredom makes her snap at others in class, her social skills and emotional intelligence are greatly lacking but she doesn’t think they are, Frank sometimes has declare “no more math today” to get her outside, and so on.  She’s fully a math genius and fully a little little girl, making up goofy songs about her one-eyed cat and playing with Legos in between solving differential equations.

I also love Mary’s relationship with Frank.  He doesn’t talk down to her in the least, patiently answering every question she asks him to the best of his abilities – the scene of the two of them on the beach, with her climbing all over him as she asks if God exists, is perfect – and he works hard to strike a balance between nurturing her interests and making sure she has as much of a “normal life” as possible.  His concern over people discovering her abilities is understandable, given what kind of life his genius sister had, and I like his focus on helping her to be a more well-rounded person, pushing her to interact more and try to understand how others are feeling.  At the same time, I like that he’s plagued by near-constant doubt over whether he’s doing right by Mary and raising her as his sister would have wanted.  Once the grandma enters the picture, the film gets into the question of the proper way to address a situation like this.  What is the responsibility of the caregiver?  Is Frank doing Mary a disservice by not placing her somewhere that continually furthers her intellectual growth?  Is it irresponsible, is it selfish, to deny the world a mind like Mary’s and the ideas she could have given proper tutelage?  While I don’t think the custody-battle stuff is as good as the core of the basic set-up and Frank and Mary’s relationship, these are interesting questions to look at because the answer isn’t cut and dry.

Chris Evans does terrific work as Frank:  smart, self-deprecating, flawed, caring, dedicated, and unsure.  McKenna Grace, who’s lately been young Emma on Once Upon a Time, is equally good as Mary – like I said, her character feels like a genuine person rather than a stilted idea of what a child genius is like.  Rounding out the cast are Lindsay Duncan as Mary’s grandma, Octavia Spencer as Frank and Mary’s neighbor, and a rather excellent Jenny Slate as Mary’s teacher.

Warnings

Language, sexual content, drinking, and thematic elements.

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