GIFTED NOT SO SMART
New film means well, but story wanders wildly
If you made a Venn diagram of superhero talents, romantic comedies and movies about child prodigies, the intersecting set would be the movie Gifted.
That may make it difficult for it to find an audience. Certainly if you want to know what the director of The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb) and the star of Captain America (Chris Evans) can get up to without any spandex or visual effects, Gifted is for you.
Similarly, if you think you’ll swoon watching Nicholas Sparks-type hunk Evans repair boats and fall for the local gradeschool teacher (Jenny Slate), go see it. And ditto if you like the idea of an adorable sevenyear-old (Mckenna Grace) who is wise beyond her years and math-smart beyond everyone else’s.
Just know that you’ll be watching all three of these stories at once. Grace stars as Mary Adler, a pint-sized math prodigy who is being raised and home-schooled by her uncle Frank (Evans) after the death of her mother years earlier. When Frank decides to send her to the local school for a shot at a normal childhood, Mary chafes at the simple work she’s asked to do. Slate, as her teacher Bonnie, suggests special schooling. But Frank wants her to socialize with people her own age.
As he’s weighing his options, up pops his mother, Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), looking to take custody of the child. She clearly doesn’t have a maternal neuron in her ganglia, but wants Mary to bring her intellectual resources to bear on one of the famously tricky Millennium Prize challenges — specifically, the Navier-- Stokes problem of existence and smoothness in fluid dynamics. (And I thought Scarlett Johansson had cracked that one, but apparently not.)
And so Gifted turns into a family courtroom drama, with a wry judge (John M. Jackson) listening sympathetically as Frank’s downhome lawyer argues against the flinty Evelyn and her high-priced litigators. All this as Frank finds himself falling for Bonnie, and as Mary continues to say adorable things about the grown-ups in her life, including her neighbour and best friend Roberta (Octavia Spencer, who is so much better than this onenote role).
To be fair, Webb does a pretty good job of juggling the various narrative balls, and Evans looks relaxed in a role where the most physical thing he has to do is throw a boat-engine part across the dock in frustration.
But the overstuffed script by Tom Flynn wanders wildly. In one ill-advised scene, Frank takes his niece to a hospital maternity ward for what is meant to be an experience about family bonding, but just winds up looking weird. In another, a conversation between Frank and Bonnie gradually fades to silence, as though he’d stopped listening to her.
There’s still a lot to enjoy in the story, including Fred the adorable one-eyed cat, who has a key part to play late in the film. But the movie’s emotional beats are too spread out, and often accompanied by such lazy soundtrack choices as Cat Stevens’ The Wind.
Gifted means well, but like little Mary you may end up feeling smarter by half than what you’re watching.