![]() ![]() Its characters banter effectively, acknowledging the key emotion beats of their relationships while cleverly deflecting the more earnest tangents. Tom Flynn’s screenplay has an endearing sense of humour that tends to pull the movie back from the edge in these moments. Still, Gifted mostly keeps on an even keel, striking an effective balance between overly-sincere cheesiness and genuine emotional connection. “Can we stay for another one?” Mary asks. This sugar-coated cake comes with buttercream icing. It is an incredibly heavy-handed sequence, one that doesn’t so much push the “life is beautiful button” as hammer it into the dashboard. At one point, for example, Frank decides to defuse a tense family situation by dragging Mary out into the world to witness a random (and unscheduled) expression of beauty in the world. This is not a big problem, although there are points at which Gifted leans a little bit too heavily into its sweetness. Evelyn might occasionally score a rhetorical point, but her character motivations are always positioned in explicitly selfish terms. Frank and Evelyn might gesture towards some philosophical debate about the moral burden of genius, but Gifted always returns its attention to the psychodrama involving these characters. The conflict at the heart of Gifted might be framed in abstract terms, but the movie is careful to make sure that the drama remains focused on the characters. Gifted largely avoids these hefty questions. Whenever it seems like the movie might say something that seems too bold or too provocative, it pulls back. However, Gifted is far too gentle to really push the point. There are moments in which Gifted threatens to transform into a much bolder and more vicious take on that idea, one invested in questions of agency and determinism. These were the sorts of questions that powered Whiplash, the question of the obligations that a person owed to their talents and the sacrifices that they were expected to make to fulfill those ambitions. Does Mary owe her gift to the world? Is her grandmother Evelyn seeking to cynically exploit her, or does she have a moral obligation to share her talents? At one stage, he admits to having worked as an “associate professor” of philosophy, and the debate in Gifted is couched in abstracts. In some ways, Frank seems particularly suited to this dilemma. The central tension in Gifted has rooted in this question of how best to raise a child with these abilities, whether the correct thing to do with this talent is to teach a child to hone it and focus it at any cost. Instead, Gifted argues that Diane’s fragile mental state was a result of nurture, of the way in which society – and particularly her mother – treated her intelligence. However, Gifted is very careful to avoid explicitly stating that Diana Adler suffered from the kinds of mental illnesses that populate narratives like this, or that her depression was an inevitable side effect of genius. She never knew her mother, who turned out to be a mathematical genius. There are shades of this familiar cliché to be found in Mary’s family history. Gifted flirts with this idea, without committing. More than that, it can be handled rather clumsily in popular culture films like A Beautiful Mind come to mind. Although there may be some evidence to back it up, it remains a controversial generalisation. That popular notion is reinforced through narratives that tie intelligence together with mental illness, often suggesting that true genius is tantamount to insanity. The movie is essentially anchored in the frequent refrain that intelligence can exist as a barrier to happiness and fulfillment. The conflict at the heart of Gifted is familiar. ![]()
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