Delayed Reaction: The Gift

The Pitch: Remember that weird guy from high school? I wonder what he's up to now?

A man runs into a former classmate who ingratiates himself into his life.

Not all actors get into directing. You can learn a lot from the ones who do by how they break into it though. We tend to remember the big debuts, like Robert Redford directing Ordinary People or Kevin Costner directing Dances with Wolves, both serious films that went onto Best Picture wins. Get Out makes perfect sense for Jordan Peele's love of satire. Even something lightweight like That Thing You Do! makes sense as the always jovial Tom Hanks' feature film debut. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Joel Edgerton is a weird dude.

He's best known as a handsome, tough guy actor, but he's been writing for years. He's in that Justin Thoreux "it's not fair that he can look like that and be a talented writer too" group in Hollywood. The Gift is his directorial debut and it's telling. Pretty good too. I like that he takes a genre movie like this as seriously as he does.

I was on board with this movie until the very end. Jason Bateman is one of the great working comedy straight men, and he keeps finding ways to use that to add new shades to other kinds of performances. There's not much that separates his character here from Michael Bluth. He changes the level of the Bluth performance just a bit and he becomes a very deceptively unlikable character in this. Joel Edgerton isn't the best choice for his role. He's a little too imposing to pull off the more desperate aspects of his character. While the ending suggests that a lot of this was an act, that doesn't make up for the fact that I had trouble believing it in the moment. Rebecca Hall is great, as always. As the movie shifts slowly more to her POV, she's able to sell both her sympathy for Edgerton's character and her desire to be on her husband's (Bateman's) side.

That ending lost me though. As a twist, it's great. I didn't see it coming. It makes Bateman complicit in the lie. And, it's not something that can be forgotten. I don't like how it's treated in the screenplay though. The movie is very much Rebecca Hall's. She's the POV character. Most of the movie is about how she fits into the conflict between the two men. I'm not a fan of how the final twist turns her into an object. There's something cheap about it. She loses her agency, and the movie makes it about how it affects Bateman. The end shifts to his POV. It feels like Edgerton as a filmmaker is doing the same thing that we're supposed to judge his character for in the movie. He's taking the movie from Hall. It's lame that this is ultimately about the conflict between two men who use the woman as an object, especially since it isn't doing it as a commentary of that.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend