Posted: 12/06/2007

Grace Is Gone

(2007)

by Austin Moran

As of this week, just under 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq. In a culture free from the pressures of selective service and awash in personalized media outlets like MySpace pages and YouTube channels, this fact is all too easy to ignore.

Doubtless my own irresponsible ignorance would have continued were it not for the new film by James Strouse, Grace Is Gone. A straightforward 85-minute requiem for lost innocence and a paean to the power of new beginnings, this small, plain film puts the personal costs of war front and center in its frames.

When an army husband, Stanley Phillips (John Cusack), learns that his wife Grace has been killed in the line of duty in Iraq, he finds himself faced with the daunting challenge of single parenthood. Frustrated by his own inability to serve his country due to poor eyesight and languishing in an unfulfilling job as a home supply store supervisor, Stanley is so emotionally isolated that his idea of bonding with his daughters is to force them to turn off cable newscasts of the military’s dubious progress in the middle east. (A support group for army wives doesn’t go much better when the subject turns to pre-deployment sex.) Informed by an army captain of his wife’s death, Stanley cannot even muster the courage to tell his two daughters the truth about their mom.

Instead, he takes twelve year-old Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe) and her eight year-old sister Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) on an impulsive road trip from their nameless Midwestern town to the Enchanted Gardens amusement park in Florida. Along the way the trio stop at Stanley’s mother’s house, only to find John, Stanley’s ne’er-do-well younger brother (Alessandro Nivola, in crunchy grad student mode) taking an afternoon nap on the couch while cartoons blare from the TV. Grandma is out for the day, it seems, so John takes his two nieces to lunch while Stanley curls up on his childhood bed, alone.

John tells the two girls that their scrupulous and boring father cheated on an eye exam to get into the army, where he met Grace. Heidi asks why their dad didn’t go on fooling army doctors forever in pursuit of the military career he wanted. “Eventually they gave him a test he couldn’t cheat on,” John tells her. When Stanley failed it, he had no choice but to leave Grace alone in uniform.

This idea of coming up against a test for which there are no easy answers is central to Grace Is Gone. Like the larger national predicament in Iraq, a subject handled with deft obliquity in the film, it is possible for Stanley to go on for a long time without coming up with a practicable plan of action regarding his family and his deceased wife. As he drives his daughters down to Florida, the provisional nature of Stanley’s relationship with the truth and with his own offspring begins to crack, and Mr. Cusack allows the audience to see how through these cracks a stronger, more lasting union might emerge, if only Stanley has the courage to let it grow.

Mr. Cusack is poignantly aided in this struggle by Ms. O’Keefe, who does a memorable job of portraying Heidi’s preadolescent mix of suspicion that all is not right on the home front with disarming daughterly trust. The bubbly Ms. Bednarczyk sets the responsibility of Heidi’s newfound awareness, when it comes, in sharp relief.

Through it all, however, the movie functions more as balm to the soul than family wartime polemic. Strouse’s direction is competent to the point of disappearing in its subject, and aside from some handheld camerawork at the amusement park, Jean-Louis Bompoint’s cinematography serves to highlight the steady, if at times ploddingly natural progression of the characters. A father-daughter moment of anti-smoking education, shot from across a parking lot, comes off as refreshingly unforced. When Stanley finally tells his daughters the truth about their mother, Strouse mutes the dialogue, letting Clint Eastwood’s subtle score do the talking.

If we as a country have learned one thing from our experience in Iraq, it could be that words—along with the politicians who would control them—are flawed at best and disingenuous at worst. Sometimes honest acceptance is what counts.

Austin Moran is a film critic and freelance writer living in New York City.

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