The Gift

The Gift is a very effective genre thriller. Ah, but which genre?
      In dramatizing the amoral bullying in corporate culture it’s a white-collar crime melodrama. Its explicit theme of the terrible costs of bullying makes it a social commentary. In interweaving the guilt and innocence of an apparently virtuous and an apparent evil, it ventures into Hitchcock territory — as emphasized by one eruption of shrill strings (a la Psycho). 

But the film draws most effectively upon the Woman’s Film tradition — Rebecca, Gaslight, etc. — as a strong, fragile woman has her sanity thrown into doubt by two strong, scheming men.  “I’m not crazy,” she assures herself as she watches her faith in her husband, her marriage and his career crumble together.

Robyn (Rebecca Hall) was torn away from her Chicago home, career and independence to serve husband Simon’s (Jason Bateman) ambitions in a California suburb. Left vulnerable by a miscarriage, she is further unsettled by the mysterious Gordo (Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed). He besieges the young couple with gifts, then undermines her confidence with suggestions of her husband’s past misdeeds. 

Bateman plays against his persona when his amiable character is exposed to be a liar and a bully, who has no qualms about ruining someone else’s life to get ahead. We learn he ruined Gordo’s as a kid, but now as an adult destroys a rival with unfounded slander. 

Simon personifies male authority. As Gordo recalls, Simon used his name to bend others to his will, especially when he ran for students union president (always an omen of adult corruption). What Simon says, everyone did. We watch Simon tyrannize Robyn despite his obvious love for her.

His glide through life ends here when Gordo wreaks a magnificent, ironic revenge. When  Gordo was a child Simon led his schoolyard  bullying and beating. He and a pal falsely accused young Gordo of being homosexually molested, which led to his near murder by his father and his derailment from any normal life. As if in atonement Simon’s partner in crime became a chiropractor, as if to bring compensatory relief to the afflicted. Simon pursues a career in “security systems,” ironically apt for a man who builds his own security on causing the insecurity of others.

In his revenge Gordo reverses that first crime. He poisons Simon’s mind with the idea that Gordo raped and inseminated an unconscious Robyn. Gordon sends Simon a tape of the scene and of the couple’s domestic conversations. This invasion humiliates the security systems specialist. Gordon undermines Simon entirely. Simon will always see Gordo’s eyes in his new son. Having seen how badly Simon beat Gordo Robyn will not return to him or their house. In the last shot Gordo walks away blurred by hospital glass, tossing aside the arm brace he had worn to dramatize Simon’s assault. The broken man has broken his nemesis. 

Robyn is trapped between the two men. As Gordo visits her when Simon is at work Simon suspects Gordo wants to take her from him. That’s the insecurity of the bully. Perhaps from that anxiety Gordo gets the idea how to get back at his boyhood tormentor. He makes the bully’s dread a reality. At the end nothing Simon says means anything. He loses not just his promotion but his job, his marriage — and any confidence his son is his and not Gordo’s.