This is the story of a quiet southern town on the bayou overwhelmed by a half dozen world class actors, each intent on grabbing the spotlight.
All intentent on destrying the Old South.
Cate Blanchett is a local psychic who gives readings to everybody in town. She gives us an inside look into “The Secret Life of Every Small Town in the Old South.”
As a resident of one such small town myself, the first thing I noticed was the absence of any black folks. There are no pockets of black poverty in this small town, no junk cars in the front yards, rusting old appliances in the back yards, no unsupervised black children everywhere in between.
The film producers must have worked mighty damn hard to get so many clear shots with no black residents and their quintessential cracker box homes fifty years behind in their regular maintenance.
Everybody in town is white, apparently. Everybody in school is white, too. It must be a private Christian school, because the public schools in small Southern towns are almost 100% black.
The only blacks in the whole film are a couple of black kids in the courtroom (not too far from the Confederate flag hanging by the judge’s bench) dressed nicely and behaving themselves.
It’s hard to explain how so many A list actors could sign onto this modest story. My guess is they were anxious to denigrate the South. Hollywood HATES the South. The actors all portray prototypical Hollywood redneck stereotypes. This is quite a stretch for such esteemed celebrities who usually take only heroic roles. In this film none of them has any redeeming qualities at all.
Giovanni Ribisi is a psycho who goes over the edge time and again with random acts of violence.
Keanu Reeves is the town drunk, an abusive husband and wife beater with a blind hatred of “witches, niggers, and Jews.”
Katie Holmes is the town whore (the only lady in town who “knows how to fuck,” several people testify), slut, and general harridan.
Hilary Swank is Reeve’s battered wife who still desperately loves him despite a body full of cuts, bruises, and a black eye; still, she’s lost without him.
Even Cate Blanchett the psychic withholds vital information from the law to accomplish her mischevous ends.
Yes, everybody who sees this film will sure as hell stay on the Interstate next time they drive through the Deep South on summer vacation, and lock the SUV doors if’n they ever have to venture into Smallville.
Then, when they see how gutted the small towns are with ramshackle black homes, dirt poor black stragglers hanging out at the dime store, and poor little black kids playing barefoot in the streets, they’ll know who to blame — the deranged redneck White Supremacist Aristocracy with their Confederate flags in the courthouse.
I never did figure out what “The Gift” was.
Maybe that’s the point.
