Jonathan Kaplan
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The suburban-insecurity theme also stirs memories of David Fincher's Panic Room, Jonathan Kaplan's Unlawful Entry and even Neil Labute's Lakeview Terrace; the barely concealed bloodlust of the bourgeoisie recalls The Last House on the Left; while the idea of state-sanctioned, carefully contained mayhem was executed on a grander scale in The Hunger Games and Rollerball.
He has the infectious grin of a young Matthew Broderick— the similarities between them might be distracting if it weren’t such a pleasure to be reminded of what it was like to discover that earlier cheeky grin back in the WarGames, Project X and Ferris Bueller era.
It made me think of Carol Clover’s comment in Men, Women and Chain Saws that Jonathan Demme’s 1988 prestige rape-revenge thriller The Accused “ends where many women’s fear beings, at the moment the jury delivers the guilty verdict” and that “its implication that the story is over when the men are sentenced is pure Pollyanaism.”
At face value, Edgerton’s film about a suspicious oddball intruding upon a married couple’s carefully manicured life sounds akin to serviceable stalker schlock like “Pacific Heights,” “Unlawful Entry” or “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”
It's the kind of setup that's typically employed in the context of an entertaining yet far-from-fresh "blank from hell" thriller (eg The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Temp, Unlawful Entry, etc, etc) and yet writer/director Edgerton does a superb job of ultimately subverting one's expectations, as The Gift, though saddled with a rather familiar opening hour, eventually moves into a third act that's riddled with impossible-to-predict surprises and plot twists.
That's the superficial starting point of The Gift, the directorial debut of actor Joel Edgerton, who takes the cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller template – which became ubiquitous in the early '90s with films like Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – and, by introducing psychological depth and a streak of social conscience, fashions an intriguing morality tale.
In 1988, The Accused came along, bringing the legal struggles of survivors to the forefront of the narrative, making the rape-revenge films that came before it culturally obsolete.
The cheaply constructed catharsis born from masculine perspectives and their attempts to navigate a woman’s emotional experiences in response to rape and sexual assault ranges from well intentioned exploitation such as I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman) or any number of high-profile dramatic representations in morbid, if effective melodramas ( The Accused ; Death and the Maiden , Elle , etc.).
As a result, Clark undercuts whatever aspirations he may have had in attempting to make a movie of the level of Jonathan Kaplan's "Over the Edge" or Tim Hunter's "River's Edge," two classic studies of lethally disaffected suburban youth.
William threatens Jeremy not to consider Gloria another "notch on your belt" ("I'm beltless," he protests, weakly); John is horrified but goes along when Kathleen make him "feel her hooters"; Gloria's middle-of-the-night bondage scene makes Jeremy feel "like Jodie Foster in The Accused"; and eventually, a drunken Jeremy confesses his growing affection for Gloria to Father Gibson (Henry Gibson), after all ("Maybe I'm a little crazy").
Wilson is as blandly charming and recessive as in The Life Aquatic; with drunk-auctioneer delivery of lines like "The proper girl in the hat just eye-fucked the shit out of me," the perpetually riled Vaughn can generate a modicum of goodwill, one immediately negated by lines like "I felt like Jodie Foster in The Accused last night."
Likewise, Jodie Foster made two movies like this, The Accused (1988), for which she won an Oscar, and The Brave One (2007).
It’s not a home-intrusion thriller, like “Unlawful Entry” (1992) or “Panic Room” (2002), though it’s often spikily tense.
Not that a rape-revenge flick should be “fun” but Elle didn’t quite have the sleazy exploitation stank of Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, nor did it have the intense laser-focus of Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused.
I was bored, I was thinking “Who are they kidding?”, and I noticed the shocking similarity to “Immediate Family.”
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (nanny from Hell), Unlawful Entry (cop from Hell), Pacific Heights (landlord from Hell), to name just three.
As in movies like "Boys Don't Cry" or "The Accused," "Elephant" exists in an atmosphere of queasy anticipation of the atrocity you know is coming at the end.
This is an odd movie, traversing "The Accused" territory one minute and ''Smokey and the Bandit" the next.
Even Foster's performance, good as it is, skirts self-parody when it recalls some of her other pictures (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Nell) by positing her as some kind of middlebrow authentication of earnest female self-empowerment.