Southern Gothic ‘Gift’ Bears a Mixed Blessing

If “The Sixth Sense” left you with any doubts, Annie Wilson is here to tell you that seeing dead people is no fun. None at all.

The protagonist of “The Gift,” Annie is the resident seer of tiny Brixton, Ga., a person blessed (or is it cursed?) with second sight. “I see things, I sense things, they haven’t happened yet,” is how she puts it. Sometimes, though it hardly makes her day, she can see dead people, no extra charge.

As directed by Sam Raimi and written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson (who collaborated on “One False Move”), “The Gift” shows what happens when you throw efficient direction and some strong acting at formulaic material. “The Gift” is effective moment to moment, but the excessively melodramatic nature of the Southern gothic plot finally gets too out of hand for even the skill invested here to redeem.

“The Gift” wouldn’t get as far as it does without the work of Cate Blanchett, whose beleaguered Ms. Wilson solidifies her position as one of the preeminent screen actresses. And Keanu Reeves is especially noticeable in a strong supporting cast for giving the kind of performance most people wouldn’t have thought he had in him.

Though she began acting in Australia, Blanchett, as usual, has no problem being immediately convincing as a Georgia widow raising three children on her own. With her raw-boned look and mastery of accents (she was just as persuasive as a Long Island housewife in “Pushing Tin”), Blanchett soon has you believing she’s as authentic as Tammy Wynette.

When one of Annie’s sons acts up in school, she has a meeting with his empathetic principal, Wayne Collins (Greg Kinnear), and gets introduced to Wayne’s fiancee, the luscious and flirtatious-to-a-fault Jessica King (Katie Holmes), daughter of the town’s most prominent citizen.

These, however, are not really Annie’s kind of people. Her clientele for card readings comes from the dirt-poor classes, otherwise friendless people like a troubled auto mechanic, Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi), and an anxious wife, Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank).

Valerie, as it turns out, has reason to be anxious. Her husband Donnie (Reeves) is both a philanderer and physically abusive. When Annie, who acts as a therapist as much as a card reader, advises Valerie to get out of Dodge, Donnie is seriously displeased. And when Donnie is displeased, people tend to notice.

Invading Annie’s home and calling her a Satan worshiper and worse, Reeves’ Donnie Barksdale is genuinely terrifying as well as a complete departure for the actor. Usually more Buddha-like than boisterous, Reeves successfully taps into powerful reserves of vindictiveness and hostility that he’s never revealed before. And just when Donnie turns really nasty, Jessica King up and disappears and Annie starts seeing dead people. The unpleasant kind.

Director Raimi, whose career began with the descriptively titled “The Evil Dead” and “The Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn” and moved on to more mainstream material like “A Simple Plan” and “For Love of the Game,” has, with some success, met himself halfway with this film. The performances are interesting, and Raimi’s ability to use crisp editing (Bob Murawski and Arthur Coburn did the honors) to make us jump is much in evidence, at least in the early going.

But “The Gift” overpromises; its setup proves to be much better than its delivery. The film’s characters lean too heavily toward the Southern grotesque, and the direction the plot is heading is more predictable than it should be. To live by pulp is to die by pulp, and overly familiar material, even well done, cannot be made more intrinsically interesting than it is. Not even by Cate Blanchett and Keanu Reeves.

* MPAA rating: R, for violence, language and sexuality/nudity. Times guidelines: frightening more for its intensity than its graphic quality.

‘The Gift’

Cate Blanchett: Annie Wilson

Giovanni Ribisi: Buddy Cole

Keanu Reeves: Donnie Barksdale

Greg Kinnear: Wayne Collins

Hilary Swank: Valerie Barksdale

Katie Holmes: Jessica King

Lakeshore Entertainment and Paramount Classics present a Lakeshore Entertainment/Alphaville production, released by Paramount Classics. Director Sam Raimi. Producer James Jacks, Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi. Executive producers Sean Daniel, Ted Tannenbaum, Gregory Goodman, Rob Tapert. Screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson. Cinematographer Jamie Anderson. Editor Bob Murawski, Arthur Coburn. Costume designer Julie Weiss. Music Christopher Young. Production designer Neil Spisak. Set decorator Marthe Pineau. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

Exclusively at the Loews Cineplex Beverly Center, La Cienega at Beverly Blvd., (310) 652-7760.