The Ultimate Gift

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Ultimate Gift a recent Christian tear-jerker.

An ultra-rich old gent dies. His vultures of family only care about getting their piece of the estate. They get something, but none of them is satisfied of course because they are all a bunch of spoiled greedy bastards and bitches. Worst of all is one grandson Jason, who hates the old geezer and doesn’t want anything from him at all.

But Jason is offered an odd proposition from the executor lawyer of the grandfather’s estate: a plan the old guy devised. Jason must do whatever the old guy tells him, in a series of videos the old guy taped before he died. These constitute a series of gifts leading to ‘the Ultimate gift.’ But if Jason fails in any one, he gets nothing and the whole process ends. The lawyer is the one who decides if Jason has succeeded or failed at any task/gift.

The first ‘gift’ is to go on a Texas cattle ranch and put posts in holes for a fence for a month. At the end of the month of hard work Jason goes back. This is ‘the gift of work’ and Jason, who was expecting something good out of this, is annoyed, pissed.

Next, he loses everything! This is the ‘gift of friendship.’ At the end of a month he must come back to the lawyer with a true friend. But of course with no money or possessions, Jason quickly finds out that all his ‘friends’ want nothing to do with him. They are only fair-weather friends. All he can find, on the very last day, is a little girl and her mother who come each day to the park where Jason sleeps on a bench. The little girl is your typical precocious wise-cracking TV sitcom kid. She agrees to go and say she is his friend, though Jason says, ‘I can’t promise anything.’ But as we will see, the kid has her own motives.

Next up is the gift of money. What happens is he gets a check for $1500 for working on the Texas ranch. But he must spend the money on someone else – somebody who needs it more than he does. He goes to the park scratching his head. There he sees a bum with whom he fought over the rights to sleep on one of the benches. He’s about to give the bum some of the money, but the bum runs off, dropping a bag. This turns out to belong to the little girl’s mother. And inside are all sorts of unpaid bills, and medical expenses.

Jason tracks them down in the hospital, and learns the little girl, the beautiful wise-cracking little girl, is dying of leukemia. Jason pays the money to cover the mom’s back rent.

Next up is the ‘gift of family.’ He must spend Thanksgiving with his relatives. He takes the little girl’s mother there – he doesn’t think he can face his family alone, and the little girl has her eye on making him marry her mom – that was the kid’s motive in agreeing to be Jason’s friend. Nothing good comes of the dinner though, and Jason is so angry at his family, and himself for being part of it, and just like them (or he was) that he pisses off the mother of the little girl, and they split.

Next up comes the ‘gift of learning.’ He is flown to Ecuador where his father died. This death and the reasons behind it (Jay, Jason’s father, was working for the grandfather’s oil company when he died) lie at the root of Jason’s disaffection and hatred of his grandfather, for he blames his grandfather for his father’s death. In Ecuador though he learns though that the story he has grown up with about his father’s death is not entirely accurate. At the site of the plane crash, deep inside bandit territory, Jason is told that his father simply was running away from the oil company, and nobody is to blame for his death but himself.

Jason is captured by the bandits, and held for some weeks for ransom. But no ransom comes, and at last, about to be killed, Jason makes good his escape, saving another prisoner along with him.

When Jason gets back to the States, there’s the little girl’s mom waiting for him, worried, for she has been told he fell into bandit country and nobody expected him to come out of it alive. So Jason gets to meet the little girl again, but she’s mad at him, because she wanted Christmas with him and her mom; but Jason was held captive then, and so no Christmas – and it was likely to be the girl’s last Christmas.

So Jason takes mother and daughter to the ranch in Texas and they stage Christmas for her. And there Jason learns what the next gift is to be: the ‘gift of dreams’ – Jason now must create his own dream. But he can’t think of anything. So he has the idea to come up with some way of helping others fulfill their dreams. He is given 100 million dollars, and he designs a hospital for families with health problems, with houses for the families, and a place for parents to work while their kids or loved ones are sick in the hospital, and he puts the whole 100 million into it.

It seems that he has fulfilled all the conditions, succeeded at all the steps. The 100 million is his ultimate gift, his inheritance – but now he has given it away. (The seventh sequence then is coming up with the plans for the hospital, and the presentation of it, to rich people and corporate heads who were affiliated with his grandfather – the hospital will actually cost 350 million, so he pressures them into providing what his money can’t.)

But in the midst of the presentation, just as the others agree to provide all the funds, there comes a call. Mother and Jason rush to the hospital, too late – the wise-cracking little girl is dead.

Jason now goes to see the lawyer one last time. There is another final message from the old grandfather: this is really it, the ‘Ultimate gift’ which is the person Jason now has become. He gets the bulk of the old man’s estate, worth something like two billion. Yeah, they don’t think small when they think rich in American movies!

But most of all Jason misses the taped videos of his grandfather. He gets to go into the room where the old man taped them all, and there he encounters the old man’s ghost, or angel, or whatever, for final words. Since the grandfather is played by James Garner, the biggest marquee name in the cast, it’s only fitting to try to work some way for him to be in a scene with the movie’s star who plays Jason. But it’s also Christian, and the old man says, ‘As long as you’re alive I’ll be alive too.’

Yeah, more tears! I guess I’m just a softy…

The film I would say is not a Hollywood movie. It strikes me as an indie, but one with a lot of polish. The tech credits are all impeccable although not up to your usual Tom Cruise movie. In fact I can glimpse where the budget got strained, and I suspect that they got a lot of donations, and every dollar showed up on screen, and that it was very modestly budgeted.

This movie is based on a book of the same title, and goes along with the American tradition of Pay It Forward and The Secret and other pop notions of the end of American excess in which the Americans thought they could be both holy and super-wealthy at the same time – that the road to riches lay in being pious and good; that Jesus was the world’s greatest car salesman. But I find it ugly and even antithetical to Christianity to propose a parable in which the guy must be shown that there are more important things than money – but then when he has those other things, he gets more money than anybody else! It just undermines the whole thing, and this contradiction lies at the ugly, sinful heart of American Christianity of the neo-Republican era of the past three decades. It’s not enough for Jason to give away the $100 million; the end result of this is, he gets 20 times as much! Charity becomes a sort of multi-level-marketing, get rich scheme.

I told you about watching Elmer Gantry a few weeks back. Well, the sort of hucksterism Sinclair Lewis skewered in Babbitt’s support of the revival meetings is the same spirit animating The Ultimate Gift so I can’t really say that this is new. But I do think it is peculiar to American notions of Christianity.

Still, as a movie experience, the film choked me up, brought tears to my eyes – how easy it is to bring the cute dying wise-cracking kid on stage to manipulate me! – and so in the end, I have to recommend it to the other soft-hearted fools out there.

Just don’t turn your brains on and think about the movie and its message afterwards. You won’t be happy.

(02 April 2009)

PS – I have to add that The Ultimate Gift does not throw its Christianity in our faces. It treats Christianity much as pre-1950s American films treated it, and as the Hammer Horror films treated religion in its 1960s Dracula film series: as a fact of life, a cult to which the majority of people in its fictional world subscribe. There is no evangelism, nor is there any sense that the ‘bad Stevens’ family members are non-believers or (perish the thought) Jews or Muslims or Buddhists.

No, the good people find comfort in God + Jesus, and the hero finds he has, inexplicably, forgotten (or his architect has forgotten) to include a ‘house of worship’ in the idealized Hospital complex – and then in the midst of his presentation to future donors he adds that he will have to include such a thing.

I’m not even sure why I’m sure that The Ultimate Gift was written and produced from a neo-Christian, peculiarly Amero-Christian, point of view. Maybe I’m just being overly suspicious or paranoid here. Maybe like the fervent anti-Communists who saw Reds under every bed in the 1950s, I see Christian zealots under every bed today.

Somehow I just can’t shake the suspicion, though.

PPS – Well, a little more research indicates that my suspicions were on target: the original book was penned by Jim Stovall, grad of Oral Roberts University; the adaptation was by Cheryl McKay, who places God Himself front and center in her new screenplay, Never the Bride … so the movie is not an ardent evangelizer, but it springs, sure as day, from that whole reactionary, backward-looking, neo-Christian part of America.