Frank Adler (Chris Evans) has been raising his 7-year-old niece, Mary, (Mckenna Grace) in a Florida beach community since she was 6-months-old and had been homeschooling her, but feels she needs to attend the local public school so she can get a more comprehensive education — “I’ve taught you all I know,” he tells her — and socialize with other kids.
“She’s got to get out in the world,” Frank tells his neighbor (and Mary’s regular baby sitter), Roberta (Octavia Spencer), who worries that he’s made the wrong decision. “She has no friends her age, no social skills. She doesn’t know how to be a kid.”
But Mary, a math prodigy like her late mother, Diane, is bored with first grade arithmetic (we later learn that she’s at least at the level of differential equations), telling her teacher, Bonnie Stevenson (Jenny Slate) that everyone knows 3 + 3 = 6.
Mary provides the answers to some addition problems Ms. Stevenson gives her without hesitation. The teacher then asks if she knows the answer to 57 X 135. Mary hesitates and Ms. Stevenson moves on with the lesson, only for Mary to announce the solution a moment later. She subsequently volunteers the square root of the product, both of which Ms. Stevenson confirms on a calculator.
When she later meets Frank outside the school, she tells him Mary might be gifted. Frank says she just used the Trachtenberg method, something he himself learned at age 8.
“Do I looked gifted to you?”
After Mary races through a number of math problems during a lesson — including some extra ones — Ms. Stevenson, who’d previously looked up the Trachtenberg method, looks up Frank and finds the obituary for his sister, a mathematician who’d been working at MIT to solve the Navier-Stokes equation and who’d died by suicide.
She confronts Frank about lying to her and he tells her Diane had come to see him one day, baby in tow, with something important to discuss. But he’d hurried off because he was late for a date, promising to talk with her when he got home.
He never got the chance.
He also says his estranged mother, Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), turned her back on Diane when Diane became pregnant.
“Didn’t fit into her plan,” Frank says. “She’s an exacting woman, my mother. Uncompromising.”
Later, in a meeting with the principal, Mrs. Davis (Elizabeth Marvel), after Mary hit a 12-year-old who’d tripped one of her classmates on the school bus, causing the boy to drop his diorama, Mrs. Davis offers to use her influence with the headmaster of a private school for gifted children to get Mary a scholarship.
Frank, who works freelance fixing boats, appreciates the gesture (the $30,000 tuition is well beyond his means), acknowledging that it’s a great school and that he’d looked into it.
“But this family has a history with those schools,” he says. “I think the last thing that little girl needs is reinforcement that she’s different. Trust me, she knows.”
He says he thinks Mary needs to remain where she is.
Mrs. Davis decides to find out everything she can about Mary and before long Evelyn shows up at Frank’s doorstep.
Evelyn, wealthy and influential, wants to fight for custody (Mary’s father was never in the picture) and bring her up back in Boston, in an environment where her mathematical gifts are developed to the utmost.
But Frank replies that Diane didn’t want Evelyn to have her.
“Diane didn’t always think things through,” Evelyn says.
“Arguably one of the brightest minds on the planet. Good luck going down that road.”
Evelyn asks if he thinks Diane would be pleased if she saw how Mary is living now.
“That she’s living a somewhat normal life? Yes. I do.”
“She’s not normal,” Evelyn replies. “And treating her as such is negligence on a grand scale.”
While Frank doesn’t want Evelyn to raise Mary, he later confesses to Bonnie his greatest fear is that he’ll ruin her life.
A custody hearing follows and Mary tells Frank she wants to remain with him, even after a two-day visit to Boston with Evelyn, which includes a trip to MIT to see if she can solve a complex math problem.
At one point, Frank’s lawyer, Greg Cullen, (Glenn Plummer) — who says the judge is likely to side with Evelyn’s money — comes to him with a compromise that Evelyn’s lawyer had suggested — one that would keep Mary close by (and allow her to attend the private school). What’s more, she’d be able to decide on her 12th birthday where she wants to live.
Neither Frank nor Evelyn are wild about this compromise — which Mary sees as a betrayal (Frank had promised her they’d stay together) — but they agree to it.
But then, thanks to Bonnie’s timely intervention, he discovers an unacceptable aspect to this compromise and decides to take action.
He also decides it’s in both Evelyn’s and Mary’s best interests that Evelyn know certain facts about Diane and to ignore some very definite instructions his sister had given him about their mother.
“Diane didn’t always think things through,” he says.
In Gifted (2017), written by Tom Flynn and directed by Marc Webb, both Frank and Evelyn believe they’re acting in Mary’s best interests.
His primary concern is that she be raised as a normal kid, something Diane never got a chance to be.
“She wanted her to have a life,” he says during the hearing regarding his sister’s wishes about Mary. “She wanted her to have friends and to play and to be happy.”
For her part, Evelyn believes in cultivating Mary’s mathematical gifts. At one point under cross examination about Diane, she tells Cullen “the greatest discoveries which have improved this planet have come from minds rarer than radium.” It’s clear she believes Mary has the potential to be just as brilliant as her mother.
And despite the custody battle and the fact that they aren’t close — geographically or emotionally — mother and son are pleasant and agreeable with each other, even joking over Frank’s stepfather’s decision to buy a ranch in Montana, despite the fact that, as Frank puts it, “he puts on a Brooks Brothers suit to take out the garbage.”
At the end of that scene, Evelyn tells him she has no desire to hurt him.
“I hate that we’re at odds,” she says.
“We’re always at odds.”
While Frank has self-doubts about his parenting abilities, he seems to be a natural at it and both Roberta and Bonnie give him their support.
At one point Mary is devastated to learn that her birth father — whom she’s never met — was in town for the hearing and didn’t make any effort to see her.
“He didn’t even need directions,” she tells Frank. “He could have followed you here.”
Accompanied by Roberta, Frank takes her to a local hospital waiting room and says they’ll wait however long it takes. It’s not immediately clear who or what they’re waiting for until a man comes out and tells his excited family, “it’s a boy.”
Frank leans over to Mary.
“That’s exactly how it was when you were born.”
“This happy?”
“This happy.”
“Who came out and told everybody?”
“I did.”
“Can we stay for another?”
While Mary is bored at the local elementary school — she yelled at Mrs. Davis on her first day, which led to Frank and Bonnie’s initial meeting — she is supportive of her fellow students. Not only does she hit an older bully in defense of her classmate Justin (Michael Kendall Kaplan), but after having to acknowledge before her class that hitting people is wrong, she says Justin’s diorama had been the best art project and leads the class in a round of applause, cheering him up.
She also has a sly sense of humor. She hates the way the class says “good morning, Ms. Stevenson” in a sing-song tone, but can’t resist greeting the teacher in that same tone — and with a smile — during an awkward encounter.
One amusing bit of dialogue comes after Frank apologizes for getting mad at Mary when he was mad at himself — “can’t I get five minutes of my own life?” — he’d asked.
She asks if he’d meant what he’d said.
“Last month, you said I was the worst uncle in the world and you wished death upon me ‘cause I didn’t buy you a piano. Did you mean that?”
“No, not entirely.”
Which part of her statement hadn’t she entirely meant?
At MIT, Mary didn’t even attempt to solve the math problem, telling Evelyn on the way to the car that it was wrong.
“For starters, he forgot the negative sign on the exponent. It went downhill from there. The problem was unsolvable.”
Evelyn takes Mary back to the classroom, where she adds the missing elements to the problem and then solves it.
Asked why she didn’t say anything if she knew the problem was incorrect, Mary replies that Frank had told her not to correct older people.
“Nobody likes a smart ass,” she says.
Gifted is a worthy addition to your home video library.
Copyright 2024 Patrick Keating.
rickkeatingsrandommusings 