|
GRACE IS GONE Send This Review to a Friend
This film reflecting the tragedy of the Iraq war is different in that it involves a mother as a military casualty and examines the immediate effects of her death on her husband and children. Written and directed by James C. Strouse, the film is at once poignant in its implications but also contrived in the manner in which the husband/father handles his grief. Although the situation itself sends an anti-war message, the film seems to want it both ways with respect to discussions involving the justification or lack of it for the toll it is taking.
Of course, one has to have some humility in trying to second-guess how someone would behave under tragic circumstances. Not having faced such an awesome problem, I don’t want to sound glib in judging the character of the bereaved, one Stanley Phillips, played so well and solemnly by John Cusack, whose life in Minnesota is shattered by a military knock on his door.
How does he tell his children—12-year-old Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe) and her eight-year-old sister Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk)? Rather than spring the news of their mother’s loss on them, Phillips decides to take them on a trip to a Florida theme park that they’ve always wanted to visit. It is a choice that postpones the inevitable and leads his younger brother John (Alessandro Nivola) to chastise him for thinking a pleasure trip will ease the pain of losing their mother.
Given the strategy, the film becomes very contrived as Phillips becomes increasingly distraught and leaves messages on the phone answer machine with his wife’s happy voice still on it. The older daughter is beginning to suspect something. The screenplay struggles to keep the sham going, when it would seem to make so much more sense to sit the children down earlier and confide in them. But who knows how someone would act? It is just that the film must strain so hard to delay the tearful moment.
John attacks the war as useless, but his grieving brother believes it is a worthwhile war and says so in no uncertain terms. Families have the need to justify their loss and take pride in someone having died for their country, and given that the husband and father is the central force in the film, what he says seems to carry more weight than the angry words of the skeptical brother. A Weinstein Company release.
|