When a movie star decides to try his or her hand at directing, the results are not always a rousing success. For every Ben Affleck or Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford or Sarah Polley, there’s a Jason Bateman (whose Bad Words last year was terrible) or Ryan Gosling (this spring’s disaster Lost River). The latest performer hoping to join the illustrious actor-turned-director ranks is Joel Edgerton (Warrior, The Great Gatsby), who wrote, directed, and produced the new thriller The Gift. Kind of flying under the radar as one of this summer’s major releases, The Gift is actually a pretty nifty heart-pounder, and a very worthwhile directorial debut.
When Robyn (Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and her husband Simon (Jason Bateman) move to a new city, not far from where Simon grew up, the first person they encounter while out shopping is Gordo (Edgerton), a long-forgotten classmate from Simon’s past. Gordo is awkward and quiet, and Simon finds him unsettling — but Robyn convinces him that they should encourage friendship with him. Gordo, however, quickly begins sending the two many presents in an attempt to ingratiate himself with them. Before long, he’s showing up repeatedly at their house uninvited. As Gordo’s behaviour gets increasingly menacing, Robyn learns that he has ulterior motives for wanting to be close to them.
In the lead roles, Hall and Bateman are solid, especially as the film begins filling in their backstories. Bateman in particular shines in a role that allows him to escape from the blandly normal everyman roles he’s often typecast in — and he’s clearly relishing this chance to unleash a creepiness that I’m not sure I’ve seen from him before. He played a despicable asshole in the aforementioned Bad Words, but in a way that was just so unfunny and unpleasant that the whole film became irredeemable. Here, Bateman is definitely not a great guy, but he’s so charming and hard to read in the role that it’s a pleasure to try to figure him out. Allison Tolman, meanwhile, who was so extraordinary last year on FX’s Fargo, makes her film debut here — but hers is the only principal role that Edgerton doesn’t quite fully develop, trapping her in stock best-friend mode.
The film, though, is all about Edgerton. To be honest, I’ve never previously been all that impressed by an Edgerton performance, but he’s unquestionably best in show as Gordo. Gordo is meek and unassuming, and Edgerton succeeds in making a man who just exudes this air of deep, deep sadness seem supremely dangerous without ever resorting to volume or violence. Edgerton looks positively transformed in The Gift, with his bright blue eyes hidden under dark contact lenses and his face framed by equally dark hair and goatee. The effect is huge — Edgerton somehow seems animalistic, and his dark beady eyes are so strong and penetrating when Gordo unleashes his signature calm stare. It’s superb work.
As a director, Edgerton does an effective job finding tension in seemingly harmless moments. As this is a thriller, the film certainly has its share of jump scares; however, Edgerton’s real skill seems to be taking a normal scene and slowly (excruciatingly slowly) cranking up the sense of dread until your chest is a tight fist of steel and your stomach has dropped down below your seat and it all just becomes unbearable.
But Edgerton’s greatest accomplishment here is the sophisticated character-building that he achieves in his screenplay. At the beginning of the film, Robyn and Simon seem like such an unremarkable couple, two ordinary married people that we’ve seen many times before. But Edgerton gradually reveals their personalities and history layer by layer in a way that’s totally organic. There are so many revelations about what kind of people Robyn and Simon are and what they’ve done in the past that we’re never explicitly told, but that are instead hinted at and shown indirectly and unveiled one kernel at a time — and Edgerton pulls this off with such intelligence and nuance that each piece of new information he divulges comes as a surprise. Yes, this is the rare summer thriller that remains unpredictable and gasp-inducing right to the end.
We’ve all had that one acquaintance who tries too hard to be our friend, who is so oblivious to body language and social cues that he/she never picks up on how desperately we DON’T want to be friends, and so we’re stuck with an unwanted relationship that we’re forced to play along with while we try to figure out how to get out of it. It’s this tension, this discomfort, that The Gift exploits to great effect. Joel Edgerton imagines what might happen if that awkward, unwanted friend turned out to be your greatest nightmare — and the result is one of the best films of the summer. With his auspicious directorial debut, Edgerton not only suddenly establishes himself as an exciting actor, he emerges as one of the year’s most promising new filmmakers.
