12A ★★★☆☆
AFTER swinging his way from anti-rom-com hit 500 Days of Summer into the world of big-budget blockbusters with The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, director Marc Webb returns to his more intimate routes with this charming, heartfelt and sentimentally affecting family drama.
Frank Adler (Chris Evans) is a single man living in a sleepy coastal town in Florida who is left with the responsibility of raising his child prodigy niece Mary (Mckenna Grace) after her mother passes away. He does everything he can to make sure Mary has a normal life but this leaves her bored at a school teaching her things way below her intellectual capabilities. So in steps his formidable mother Evelyn (a wonderfully steely Lindsey Duncan), a woman also gifted at mathematics who brings a custody battle against Frank over what she sees as a waste of academic talent.
There’s nothing much in Gifted that will surprise or subvert your expectations; it hits pretty much all the beats you’d expect, from how the custody causes turmoil in the hitherto idyllic life Frank has built for Mary to the courtroom scenes themselves to the very destination of the story. But what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for with heart, depth of feeling and an unashamed sense of good old-fashioned sentiment so infused into the drama that it’s practically leaking from the seams. But it’s the good kind of sentiment rather than the grating kind, drawing on universally relatable themes of family bonds, sticking by the ones you love and accepting people for who they are.
Evans — so known these days for donning the star-spangled suit as Marvel’s Captain America — is shrewdly cast here, bringing his usual intense likability and charm to a performance of real emotion and believability. You really feel for him as a man doing his best for this special little girl who’s being taken away from him by forces he can’t really control.
He has a really nice sense of chemistry with rising star Grace who gives the kind of wondrous child performance that really marks her out as a star to watch for the future. Octavia Spencer also gives a memorable performance as Frank’s next door neighbour and frequent babysitter Roberta.
Adults fighting over the custody of a child and that child being caught helplessly in the middle is a mould Hollywood has gone back to time and time again, from Kramer vs. Kramer to What Maisie Knew. It’s yet another familiar note that Gifted is content to strike.
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