Grace is Gone

As he was in the recent ”1408”, John Cusack is the best thing about ”Grace is Gone”.

John Cusack, Shelan O’Keefe, Gracie Bednarczyk

Stanley Philips (John Cusack) is not pleased with his life. Working a dead-end sales job in a department store, he’s also trying to bring up his two daughters without the help of his wife, who is a soldier serving in the Iraq war.

When two military officers get Stanley out of the shower to tell him his wife has been killed in action, his mind reels. Unable to bring himself to deliver the bad news to his daughters, he instead buries his grief and makes a snap decision to take them to the Enchanted Garden theme park in Florida.

But Stanley can only avoid confronting reality for so long … and what will happen when his daughters inevitably discover the truth?

Few dramas this year have had as poignant a climax as ”Grace is Gone”; the decision to mute all audio except the subdued score gives it incredible power. Writer/director James C Strause also deserves kudos for making a thoughtful and even-handed examination of the issues surrounding military service.

Sadly, too many other elements make ”Grace is Gone” heavy going. Stanley’s decision to not only keep his daughters in the dark about their mother’s death but also drive them hundreds of miles to a fun park is just too much of a stretch. It feels more like farce than drama, the difference being that the audience goes into a farce comedy expecting the improbable and preposterous. These aren’t adjectives you want associated with a movie that’s supposed to be contemplating grief and the human condition.

What’s worse, Strause has his actors chew too much scenery in a bid to up the dramatic scale and succeeds only in being a pretentious bore. Many other films have meditated on loss and sadness without putting the audience to sleep via lingering close-ups and protracted shots of highways and countryside.

As he was in the recent ”1408”, John Cusack is the best thing about ”Grace is Gone”. He and his young co-stars take a turgid script and give it life … but it’s artificial life a lot of the time, a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster with – if you’ll pardon the pun – little grace.

The usual clique of critics who equate torpid pacing and clumsy metaphors with master filmmaking will no doubt hyperventilate their praise for this film, but those who want an actual plot along with their arty cinematography and Oscar-grubbing melodrama will be considerably less enthused.

Rating :
Reviewer : Kris Ashton