The girl’s gifted — but the plot doesn’t add up
THE title of Gifted, a slickly manipulative crowd-pleaser of a movie, refers to seven-yearold Mary (Mckenna Grace), who has been educated by her uncle, Frank (Chris Evans), at their humble Florida home, but is now facing her first day at school.
Mary’s teacher, Bonnie (Jenny Slate), soon realises she has a maths prodigy on her hands.
While the rest of the class considers the answer to one plus one (which seems a little basic even for seven-year-olds, but it’s that kind of film), Mary shows she can handle complicated multiplications like a human calculator. Soon, the stern principal tells Frank that Mary should go to a school for gifted children.
But Frank, who was a college professor himself until he opted out of academia to become a boat mechanic, doesn’t want her to feel ‘special’. The point of sending her to school in the first place was to encourage her to fit in with normal kids.
At home, Mary’s two best friends are her one-eyed cat, Fred, and the mumsy, middle-aged woman next door (Octavia Spencer).
Her idea of breezy conversation is to ask Frank if he thinks that even if Germany bails out the euro, could there still be a global depression? Plainly, she needs to be with people of her own age. Above all, Frank is desperate to stop Mary turning into her mother, his sister Diane, who was a brilliant — but socially isolated and deeply troubled — mathematician, who killed herself when Mary was a baby.
But he hasn’t reckoned on his well- heeled mother, Evelyn, entering the equation. ‘She’s an exacting woman, my mother,’ he tells Bonnie, who, in deference to the cinematic theory of probability, is becoming his love interest.
‘Uncompromising. Very British.’ How U.S. film-makers like to throw a snotty Brit into the mix, and this one is played, with magnificent, icy hauteur, by Lindsay Duncan.
Evelyn has had nothing to do with Mary, but now she knows the child is a maths prodigy, she flies down from Boston — on a plane, in the absence of a broomstick — wanting to take over the child’s upbringing. Evelyn hopes that Mary’s genius might even be applied to a famous problem that Diane, too, attempted to solve. The film duly lurches into a formulaic courtroom custody battle between Frank and Evelyn, becoming a sort of hybrid of Good Will Hunting and Kramer Vs Kramer.
Actually, though, Gifted put me more in mind of another, lesserknown picture. The fine 2015 British film X+Y also told the tale of a maths prodigy, but he was a genuine social misfit, on the autistic spectrum, and his story somehow rang much truer than Mary’s.
The problem here is that director Marc Webb, who made such a nice job of the 2009 rom-com 500 Days Of Summer, doesn’t want Mary’s extraordinary mind to deflect us from her cuteness.
So she’s mildly challenging, but never remotely what you’d call anti-social. When she does attack another child on the school bus, naturally it’s because he is a nasty bully. In fact, she’s altogether lovely. Webb, and screenwriter Tom Flynn, are trying to have their cake and eat it. Or maybe, in the
circumstances, their Pi. To an extent, this works, mostly because Mckenna Grace is a startlingly good, indeed gifted, young actress.
And Evans, too, in what must be a welcome break from Captain America, convinces as a decent if sardonic man who has rejected the values he was raised by in favour of getting diesel oil under his fingernails and is determined to do the right thing by his niece.
So, I can’t promise this film won’t prick your tear ducts.
For me, however, it is 20 per cent too calculating, with an irritatingly artful score that goes from syrupy to plaintive to jaunty and back again, and certain shots, such as one of Frank and Mary silhouetted against the setting sun, that are cheesier than a whole lorry-load of Monterey Jack.
That said, Grace’s hugely impressive performance deserves to be seen. S ADLY, the same cannot really be said of Brian Cox’s Winston Churchill in Jonathan Teplitzky’s film, simply titled Churchill, about the mighty wartime leader’s angst on the eve of D-Day in 1944. There have been some wonderful representations of Churchill on screen. This year alone we’ll have had at least three more by the time Gary Oldman plays him in Darkest Hour.
But I hope Oldman and the others won’t mind my suggestion that, actually, old Winston is surely quite an easy character for a good actor to inhabit.
So many mannerisms to sink one’s acting chops into, not to mention the voice, the cigar, the hat, the V-for-victory.
Cox, a terrific screen actor, does it ably enough, though he isn’t much helped by Teplitsky’s unforgiving use of the close-up. Churchill had the soft pink skin of the aristocracy, whereas Cox, if he’ll pardon me saying, is a pock-marked Dundonian.
Still, at least he has broadly the same stature as Churchill (unlike towering U.S. actor John Lithgow, who played Winston in the Netflix series The Crown, and could never quite stoop low enough).
Cox’s overwhelming difficulty is the kind of Churchill that Teplitsky, and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann, want him to be. Basically, this is Churchill on the edge of madness. Haunted by memories of Gallipoli in World War I, he is tormented by the thought that D-Day will be a similar disaster, yielding horrific casualties. It is, he says, ‘a deadly gamble and must be stopped’. U NABLE to get his way, and with General Eisenhower (John Slattery) calling the shots, Britain’s Prime Minister stomps around like an overgrown toddler, as if his famous siren suit were actually a romper suit. At one point, his infuriated wife Clemmie (Miranda Richardson) slaps him in an attempt to shock him out of his tantrum.
How much of this is rooted in fact? The historian Andrew Roberts has rubbished the film, in particular the idea that Churchill was vehemently opposed to D-Day.
My own modest research throws up a couple of lines in Roy Jenkins’ biography of Churchill, certainly suggesting that he was gravely concerned about the operation, but not that he wanted it halted.
Yet the film shows him on his knees the night before, praying that bad weather might succeed where his own furious exhortations have failed.
He doesn’t quite bellow ‘blow winds and crack your cheeks’, but Teplitsky is basically giving us Churchill as Shakespeare’s deranged King Lear, and it is very hard to see what the point of his film might be.