Review of Amish Grace (2010) by Jean-Francois V — 22 Apr 2012

I expected this film to be some flat, corny Hallmark-like production, but I was quite engrossed by it. Having read about a dozen books on the Amish, and seen several documentaries on the subject, and being highly sympathetic to their ways, I believe I have some understanding of their culture, and I didn't find anything in the film that I thought the Amish wouldn't do or should have done but didn't.

The film is inspired by a true story, the killing of five Amish girls and the maiming of five more at a Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania schoolhouse, in October 2006. Though based on a non-fiction book by one of the most prolific Amish experts, Donald Kraybill's "Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy", the film is partly fictionalised, beginning with the protagonists, the fictional Graber family. I believe the screnwriters needed to create a "relatable" character, one that finds it hard to accept the Amish way of forgiveness, and introduced the issue of shunning, which is discussed in Kraybill's book, but may not have affected any of the real-life people involved in the tragedy.

I thought the film was very moving without being manipulative, that it presented the issues fairly and without being preachy, and that as a whole, it was very well acted, even by the children. Also, it treats the main event in a very sober way, preferring not to show what took place in the schoolhouse (though we are told some of it by eyewitnesses) or any of the mangled bodies. The focus is on the emotional pain of the survivors, and their efforts to apply the Gospel teachings at such a trying time.

I was also glad that the actresses did not wear too much make-up, as Amish women are not supposed to wear any. Lead actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley wears tons of it in most of the photographs you can find on the Internet, and she was much more restrained here. Actually, after seeing all these women with something close to their real faces, it is quite a shock to discover what they look like on most of their commercial photographs. It makes me respect the Amish even more for eschewing all that glitz.

The journalist characters were a bit bland, especially the black cameraman, and I wouldn't have minded a slightly more naturalistic, slighly less romanticised depiction of the Amish, but so far, it is probably the best film I have seen this year.