Review of Gifted (2017) by G Richard B — 18 Apr 2017

Where a child's immediate happiness is fundamentally at odds with fulfilling her enormous potential in life, which should a parent choose to enable? In Gifted, two relatives of an orphan fight the question out in court. This increasingly important decision has never before been portrayed as clearly and fairly in a movie. The only thing I would have added, if I had made this film, is a connection between the Millennium Problems and their benefit to humanity. Since we cannot know their benefit until we have built on their solutions for years or perhaps centuries, the best way to show their practical application is to give examples from the past of how Heliocentric proofs, for example, allowed humanity to move forward.

Since we already deprive our offspring most of their childhood by teaching them static concepts in public schools, taking the last little bit of gaiety from one girl with a capacity to transcend these static concepts most likely would help everybody else achieve a better life. What the child wants for herself over the course of her life should always be the highest priority, and this movie deals with that fairly: one side more worried about what she will want as an adult, and the other concerned more about what she wants now. It's a tough question with many opinions, none of which this film proclaims as right. Instead, the winner is the merely the best strategist, the one who most skillfully uses emotional manipulation to reduce the will of the other. In real life, the test would be whether the child grows up glad she was enabled to take the path she did.