Cynical Cinema

My biggest complaint about Grace Is Gone is the very first scene. John Cusack is obviously some manager at some company, and he is leading his co-workers in one of those office cheers. You know - “who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “THE CUSTOMERS!” And then everyone runs off to begin their day. I once worked at a place like this. Every morning, before they began, they would put their arms around each other in a circle, close their eyes, and listen to Eye Of The Tiger all the way through. I’m not even joking. They really did this. I’ll tell you, my time at that job before I quit was the longest eleven hours of my life! Well, watching The Postman, twice, on the same overseas plane ride, with Mission To Mars sandwiched in between the two showings, was the longest eleven hours of my life. But this job was a close second.

Thank God the movie is actually decent, because it sure left a bad taste in my mouth when it began. When Cusack gets home from work, we find out that he has two charming little girls, one twelve-year-old and one eight-year-old. The older one seems wise and mature beyond her years, and a little too serious for a normal little girl. The younger one is innocent and vivacious, and seems maybe a little too young for her age. We learn quickly that their mother (and Cusack’s wife) is a soldier in Iraq. The little girl sets her watch to go off at the same time every day, which is when her mom’s watch will go off in Iraq, and they’ll think of each other. And blah blah sentinemtality…blah blah. The older daughter is an insomniac. She falls asleep in school because she can’t sleep at night, because she is thinking about mom fighting a war.

Then two military men show up at the door. Mom (Grace) is dead. And this is where the movie really starts. Cusack, losing his mind just a little, scares the hell out of his older daughter and thrills his youngest when he decides that rather than tell them about their mom, he will spontaneously put them in the car and take them on a road trip across the country to some kind of Dinseyland-type amusement park, the name of which escapes me just now. The whole movie is this road trip, and although that seems boring, enough happens that we are reasonably entertained. Cusack and his daughters, with their support-our-troops ribbon on their car, meet up with his brother, an anti-war jobless bum. I don’t think the movie as a whole is trying to say that those who question the war are shiftless losers, but it sure feels that way during the scenes with the brother, ably played by Alessandro Nivola.

And it really is the performances that hold what could be an awfully thin movie together. Most notably Cusack himself, who appears to have put on a few pounds, and forgoes his usual stutter-bitter-confused delivery for something more sympathetic and damaged. His relationship with the girls, while it starts off as sort of arm’s-length and cautious, improves throughout the trip until, at the end, he tells them their mom is dead. (I’m not ruining anything here - you had to know this movie was going to end that way, right?) It’s a pretty good scene, in the sense that the entire movie has been leading up to that moment, and it would have been very easy to make it maudlin, to contrive a tear-jerking moment, but director James C. Strouse doesn’t do that. Instead the revelatory moment is nicely understated and subtle.

The older daughter Heidi (played very well by Shelan O’Keefe), throughout the movie, knows something is amiss. She puts a lot of clues together, but can’t quite figure out what’s really going on. It seems simple enough to us watching that she should understand completely, but she is unable to conceive something of the magnitude of the death of her mother. After all, she’s just 12 years old. So that option doesn’t really occur to her, or if it does she chooses not to explore the possibility any further. And although Cusack is considerably older than Heidi, he too can’t conceive of this happening either. And the two of them are the glue that holds Grace Is Gone together. Two terrific performances that raise the level of this movie from maudlin to moving. It comes out tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.