![]() ![]() She is blissfully ignorant of the chance that the child she just gave birth to might not be her husband’s child. Robyn is completely oblivious to the possibility that she might have been raped. But Edgerton has found a new way to be vile about it. ![]() ![]() Now, women being raped or otherwise abused onscreen not to explore women’s pain but in order to make men feel something is a trope with a long and disgusting history. (Perhaps this is payback to Bateman for having been on the other side of such a scenario in the abhorrent The Switch.) The “horror” here, and the payback from Gordo to Simon, is that Simon’s “property” - his wife - might have been used by another man - and that the “property” that is the child might not even be his property! As the credits roll and the lights come up, we are meant to feel bad for Simon, or at the very least to see that he had gotten his right and just comeuppance for having bullied Gordo all those years ago. The “tragedy” of The Gift is wrapped up in its final scene, with Simon observing Robyn’s new baby in the maternity ward and becoming distressed over the idea that the baby might not be his, and that Robyn might have been raped. After a few feints at suggesting that perhaps Simon is the bad guy here, the movie gives up on that and - with this Schroedinger’s rape - settles fully on Gordo as the real villain. This is all absurdly crass and repulsive, but here is the truly appalling upshot of The Gift. After all, she and Simon had been trying for a long time to have a baby, and it wasn’t working, and then all of a sudden she’s pregnant? How could that have happened? The obvious implication is that Gordo raped Robyn and that her pregnancy could very well be the result of that. Hidden among presents for the baby that Gordo leaves at their house is a “gift” for Simon: a video recording of Gordo sneaking around their house, hovering over Robyn’s unconscious body, and dragged her away she has passed out thanks to the drugs that Gordo slipped into her sports drink. The doubt that Gordo sows in Simon consists of this: He leads Simon to believe that the baby that Robyn has just given birth to at the end of the movie might not Simon’s at all. This clichéd depiction of a woman would be offensive enough on its own, but The Gift isn’t finished giving. As a character, Robyn is so ineptly handled by the script (by Egerton, who also directs) that it reduces her to the most cardboard stereotype of a woman as fragile, confused, unstable merely because she’s a woman… though really it’s the movie itself, not Robyn, that is confused and unstable. There is no indication that she is so deluded that she hasn’t noticed that her husband is not a nice person before now (and we don’t see any evidence of Simon’s awfulness, either, until very far along in the film), and no indication that she is a victim of the sort of emotional abuse that would allow her to deny the evidence in front of her eyes (which, as I noted, is nonexistent anyway) about how her intimate partner is behaving. Yet Robyn’s discoveries about her husband don’t ring true on an emotional level. And she learns that Simon is still a terrible bully who does something to get a promotion at work that is way beyond what a normal, ordinarily ambitious but nonsociopathic person would do. He makes Robyn wonder how well she knows her husband, whom she learns was a terrible bully in high school who did something so awful to Gordo that it ruined Gordo’s life. No, Gordo’s “ the gift” is something nasty: it is the doubt and the discord he sows between Simon and Robyn. ![]() While these range from weirdly stalkerish to wildly inappropriate (and mysterious: we have no idea how Gordo could have possibly afforded an extravagance like the koi), none of that rises to the level of a the gift. And it’s probably not the much more expensive fully grown koi he later deposits in their fish pond. What is the gift of the movie’s title? It’s probably not the bottle of expensive wine Gordo leaves on their doorstep (when he wasn’t given their address) soon after he bumps into them and renews Simon’s acquaintance. What does Gordo mean by this? Is he referring to the fact that he has been bugging them to the point where it could be considered menacing? Is that somehow a “gift” that is going to make their lives better? Of course not. “Bad things can be a gift,” says Gordo (Joel Edgerton) to his old high-school classmate, Simon (Jason Bateman), and Simon’s wife, Robyn (Rebecca Hall). ![]()
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