Video review: "Gifted"

A small film with some huge names attached to it, “Gifted” is a tender little drama about an extended family fighting over the fate of a 7-year-old girl genius. Directed by Marc Webb, best known for the previous two Spider-Man movies, it’s a touch formulaic but well-acted and earnest.

Chris Evans plays Frank, uncle to the girl, Mary (Mckenna Grace), whose mother took her own life some years ago. Now she lives with Frank in a grubby community of rental homes in a part of Florida where the tourists don’t flock. He fixes boat engines for a living, but has his own past that we’ll find out more about down the line.

Octavia Spencer is Roberta, friend a maternal figure to Mary, and Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan) plays Frank’s mother, Mary’s grandmother. She pops up about halfway through the movie to sue him for custody of the girl.

Grandma wants to take Mary to a very specialized educational facility where she can work on big-brain mathematical problems – in particular, one her mother failed to solve. It’s clear Evelyn sees her granddaughter as less a child to nurture than a source of greatness that has gone untapped.

Frank would prefer that Mary stay in a regular school to gain better emotional intelligence and just be a kid. But the movie (screenplay by Tom Flynn) acknowledges that there are flaws in his line of thinking, too. Mary’s own teacher (Jenny Slate) is among those who thinks the girl would be better served in a special setting, even as she tries to resist her own attraction to Frank.

With a little bit each of family melodrama, courtroom intrigue and character study, “Gifted” is a simple movie about some large issues. It may not be the smartest or most original movie around, but it never hits a false moment or fails to engage the heart.

Bonus features are adequate, and are identical for the DVD and Blu-ray editions. These include five deleted scenes, a production gallery of still photos and location footage. There are also five making-of featurettes: “Gifted: A First Look,” “Story,” “An Accomplished Cast,” “Inside the Equation” and “Marc’s Method.”

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Review: "Gifted"

I like it when big stars and high-profile filmmakers do small movies. Almost everybody gets their start making tiny no-budget indies, so it’s nice to see a return to roots. It’s an opportunity for them to stretch their wings and do something a little more daring artistically.

“Gifted” isn’t a terribly audacious movie, but it is a tender and warm-hearted one.

Most people know Chris Evans these days as Captain America, but here he plays Frank Adler, a seemingly hard-headed man who lives in a Florida coastal town with his 7-year-old niece, Mary. Frank fixes boat motors for a living and tools around in a rusted pickup, spending his Friday nights swallowing suds at the local dive bar while a friendly neighbor watches the kid.

He’s one of those guys we pass by in our daily lives, wearing a dirty T-shirt and toiling at a menial job, and we think we know everything there is to know about him.

But Mary is a f’real genius, a first-grader who can do mathematics at a level to stump most doctoral candidates. She’s played by Mckenna Grace, a blonde, gapped-tooth zephyr of pure personality and joy. Mary hasn’t had much chance to socialize with kids her age, but Frank feels it’s important she go to a regular school and live the life of a normal kid.

It doesn’t take long for her sharp 1st grade teacher, Bonnie Stevenson (Jenny Slate), to spot the Einstein in her midst, though. Soon the principal is brought in, experts weigh in with their opinion, which is that Mary should be going to a special school for the gifted. Frank resists.

Things grow more complicated when Mary’s grandmother shows up after a 7-year absence. Evelyn Adler (Lindsay Duncan) is, to use Frank’s words, “very British.” Picture the very epitome of the rich, uptight, smart, snooty English lady who think nothing is ever quite good enough -- that’s Evelyn.

It seems Mary’s mother, who killed herself while Mary was still a baby, was also a math whiz who was on the verge of solving some Very Big and Important Problem. Now Evelyn thinks Mary is the one to carry on her work, and sues Frank -- her son -- for custody.

Unlike other movies of this kind, the court case is not really the center of the movie, which spends very little time in front of the judge. Instead, we drop in there for time to time to hear more testimony, where we learn more about the characters and circumstances. So the judicial proceeding spurs the story rather than carrying it.

I really liked Glenn Plummer as Frank’s attorney, a wise and weary local lawyer who understands that family law is a tricky area where emotions and predispositions can be more important than the law part. Octavia Spencer is in her usual fine form as Roberta, Frank’s neighbor in the squalid little cluster of rental homes where they both live. She’s the super, has helped raise Mary and sees her partially her own.

“Gifted” is an original screenplay by Tom Flynn, who wrote only one other movie about a quarter-century ago. Director Marc Webb helmed the last two “Spider-Man” movies, so like Evans he’s getting back to basics with a small, intimate film like this.

The movie is a little too predictable for its own sake, but the actors embrace the material and imbue their characters with a good deal of emotional truth. Frank is a caretaker, not just for Mary but for his sister’s memory, too. He’s not terribly happy about the burden, but (mostly) carries it without complaint.

Evelyn isn’t an outright villain, and the movie is careful to show how she can give Mary a life that Frank cannot -- one that the girl herself is eager to pursue. Grace’s performance is carefully tuned to demonstrate how an extraordinary mind can exist inside the head of a little girl who still wants to frolic on the beach and play with her one-eyed cat, Fred.

Movies are a lot like kids: you have to let them be what they want to be, rather than what we might wish ourselves. Taken on its own ample merits, “Gifted” makes its own mark.

Video review: "American Sniper"

When I wrote my initial review of “American Sniper,” the movie wouldn’t hit theaters for another month. I opined that it might not do well commercially given its subject matter, the Iraq war, and its portrait of a man who kills prodigiously for a living.

A half-billion dollars and a half-dozen Oscar nominations later, I’m glad to pronounce myself totally off the mark. One of the best movies of 2015, “American Sniper” is the deeply affecting story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL credited with 160 combat kills.

Bradley Cooper, known for playing smooth operators, is barely recognizable as Kyle. An unapologetic patriot, Kyle uses his sniper skills to take out threats to his comrades on the ground. Sometimes this involves dreadful choices, such as whether to shoot a boy holding a grenade running toward American soldiers.

It’s perhaps the best performance of Cooper’s career, totally submerging himself into the part of an unremarkable guy who discovered that he was the perfect instrument of war. Needless to say, this wreaks havoc on his private life back home with his wife (Sienna Miller) and kids. In between four tours in Iraq, Kyle struggles to fit in amid a staid world of lawnmowers and kids’ birthday parties, sensing threats on the wind.

The actual combat scenes are the real heart of the film. Rather than taking us into the midst of chaos, director Clint Eastwood shows the eagle’s-eye view of the sniper, perching on rooftops to get the best vantage point for their kills. The editing, camera work and sound effects are all top-notch.

It can be a tough movie to watch, but “American Sniper” is well worth your time.

Bonus features are a bit on the modest side, and are the same for DVD and Blu-ray editions. Both come with two making-of documentaries: “Making of American Sniper” and “One Soldier’s Story: The Journey of American Sniper.”

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Review: "American Sniper"

“American Sniper” is a complex portrait of a simple man. By “simple” I don’t mean to imply that Chris Kyle was stupid; merely that, like a lot of us, he wasn’t particularly self-reflective or complicated in his emotions. What he was was the perfect instrument for war, but one that didn’t work so well for peacetime.

Bradley Cooper gives a poignant performance as Kyle, a Navy SEAL and sniper who’s been dubbed the most lethal marksman in U.S. military history. After four tours in Iraq he is officially credited with 160 kills, and in all likelihood slew many more than that. This film, directed by Clint Eastwood with a screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Kyle, is an attempt to get at the man behind the legend.

“Legend” isn’t just hyperbole; it’s what Kyle was referred to by his fellow soldiers. He was their eyes in the sky, the avenging angel from above, who perched on rooftops and covered the grunts on foot patrol from threats they couldn’t see. While he took so many human lives as to be staggering, Kyle saw it as protecting his buddies. In his calculus, he saves lives with his long gun and ice-cold reflexes.

Cooper, known for playing fast-talking schemers and loverboys, is barely recognizable here. Sporting a bull neck, thick beard and even thicker Texas twang, Cooper fully embodies the ethos of the Texas cowboy and unapologetic patriot that Kyle was. As his daddy taught him – along with marksmanship – there are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. The dogs protect the sheep from the wolves.

The story, after an opening interlude about Kyle’s rodeo days, bounces back and forth between Iraq and stateside along with Kyle. Back home he woos and weds a fiercely smart and strong-willed woman, Taya (Sienna Miller). They start to have babies and build a life of normalcy. Except that Kyle will disappear for nine months at a time, and even when he’s back home he finds himself stuck in sniper mode, reacting to lawnmowers or family pets as deadly threats.

The movie shows just enough of Kyle’s domestic life to serve as a counterpoint to its real focus, the war. Eastwood doesn’t comment on the rightness or wrongness of our Iraq adventure, but simply deals with it on the ground as the troops did.

Unlike most war pictures, which tend to depict the chaos and madness of conflict, “American Sniper” shows battle from the controlled perspective of the marksmen, who take out enemies with surgical precision from hundreds of yards away. The worry here is not that you will be shot, but that you will shoot someone by mistake, or doom your comrades by failing to pull the trigger.

A couple of moments stand out, both involving children. In the first, Kyle witnesses an Iraqi mother passing what looks like a grenade to her son, who starts to move toward some American troops. Should he take out the boy? What if he’s wrong?

Later, Kyle kills an insurgent with an RPG. But then a little kid starts to creep toward the rocket launcher. “Don’t pick it up. Don’t pick it up,” Kyle chants from behind his scope trained on the kid’s back -- thinking of his own son while prepared to act if he must.

It’s a wrenching conundrum, to contemplate doing something terrible to prevent something even more terrible.

Excellent as it is, I suspect some people will be turned off by “American Sniper” because it celebrates someone like Kyle (who was murdered in 2013 while volunteering to help a troubled fellow veteran). He’s a throwback to an antiquated sort of cinematic manhood – resolute, remote, adept at violence – that has fallen out of favor in our age of irony and myth-busting.

But Eastwood & Co. aren’t trying to hold up Chris Kyle as an ideal, but present him as a real American doing an essential job many of us would pale at taking up. The sheep may quiver at the sight of the wolf, but the truth is the sheepdog makes us nervous, too.