Gifted

Watching Gifted, it was easy to imagine the performers practicing award speeches while waiting to deliver their next line. These speeches -- that none of them will ever get to make -- might have made better listening than the movie's dialogue.

Essentially a watered­-down version of Searching for Bobby Fischer, Gifted is earnest but phony. In this case the precocious child Mary (Mckenna Grace) is a math prodigy instead of a budding chess champion. At times, the lass seems less like an exceptionally bright child and more like an intellectual superhero.

Speaking of superheroes, moonlighting Captain America Chris Evans plays her single parent, Frank. He's actually not her father. He's her uncle and has raised Mary almost from infancy because his mother, Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan), disowned Frank's sister for having Mary out of wedlock, and Mary's father has taken no interest in the girl's welfare. There's also the delicate subject of his sibling's suicide.

Like her offspring, Frank's sister was born to add, as they say, on Sesame Street, and the pressure to create viable proofs may have led her to take her life. Frank wants Mary to have a normal childhood and to him that means attending first-grade classes where the other kids are just learning to count, while she can calculate square roots.

While Frank is justly concerned about Mary not developing social skills or friendships with youngsters her own age, Mary clearly has no business sitting through classes where the sympathetic teacher Bonnie (Jenny Slate) repeats problems Mary could have solved as a zygote.

Upon discovering that Mary has the ability to finish her mother's life work, Evelyn abruptly sues Frank for custody. Frank may use terms like "ad nauseam" in his everyday speech, but he makes his living fixing boats and lives in a modest apartment. Evelyn has quite a bit of cash and as a result has a lot of leverage over her underachieving son.

Curiously, the courtroom drama that follows isn't that engaging despite the fact that it concerns the fate of a child. It doesn't help that screenwriter Tom Flynn's dialogue sounds like a collection of monologues rather than actual conversations.

As the characters go into full soliloquy mode, the story takes a series of abrupt halts. It's hard not to watch the courtroom showdown without yelling, "Objection! Leading the witness!" during the battle between attorneys. Most judges would shut down these harangues before they go into full Oscar-clip mode.

Director Marc Webb made a promising debut with the imaginative 500 Days of Summer and has since made a pair of Spider-Man movies. He shows a remarkable eye for the Georgia-passing-for-Florida scenery, but the material here isn't demanding or well-constructed.

Evans may have played characters in the Marvel and DC universes well, but he's able to play someone without superpowers as well.

Mary's only friend is Frank's neighbor Roberta (Octavia Spencer), who is more than old enough to be her mom. After seeing Spencer convincingly portray a computer pioneer in Hidden Figures, it's a shame to see her stuck playing an obligatory eccentric neighbor.

The struggle to give a gifted child a healthy life while ensuring that her talents aren't wasted can make for solid drama as it did in Searching for Bobby Fischer. What's missing here is a sense that anyone involved has spent time with exceptionally bright kids. It's tempting to bring up my nephew Brady, who sadistically toyed with me in chess matches.

He was only 9.

He suggested moves for me to make so that defeating me wouldn't be so painfully easy. Thankfully, he has grown into a considerate guy who likes watching and playing soccer and video games as much as he enjoys statistical analysis. When you have someone like him and his older brother, who could play multiple instruments at 14, living in your own eyes, it's hard to buy into the make-believe tale on a screen.

MovieStyle on 04/21/2017