Review of Grace Is Gone (2007) by Edith N — 08 Jan 2010

In the End, We All Weep.

They think little kids don't understand death. I know that no one assumed I did, when Dad died. I remember walking around the house, feeling like I was the ghost, with no one talking to me or even seeming to notice I was there. Elaine was eight; she was old enough to know. I was six; I was not. (Elizabeth was two and almost certainly really wasn't, but in those days, she looked like a cherub and had people paying attention to her for that.) It was considered bold and daring when [i]Sesame Street[/i] told us all the truth when Mr. Hooper died, and I know Mom brought in her mother and Dad's sister, my beloved Aunt Susie, to tell us about Dad. It's not easy, and it hurts. It's all the harder when you've just lost someone you love so much yourself--and even Grandma Dillon was hardly indifferent to Dad. And we were awfully young. It's also true that my memories of that week are pretty vague, despite the fact that a lot of other memories from that time and earlier are still crystal clear. Here, it doesn't seem as though there's much support from family or friends, either--they are barely shown to have any.

Stanley Phillips (John Cusack) is raising his two kids, Heidi (Shélan O'Keefe) and Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk), while their mother, Grace (voiced by Katie Honaker on their answering machine message), is overseas in Iraq. And then one day, two men in dress uniforms show up on his doorstep. It does not take an expert in military traditions--and Stan had been in the army himself anyway--to know that this is never a good sign. And that's even leaving aside the title, which admittedly could just refer to her being overseas. Anyway, Stan is devastated, and again doesn't seem to have a real support network. He's a member of one of those groups the military puts together for what they call spouses but mean wives, but as the only man, he's not really comfortable there. He doesn't know how to tell his girls, so he doesn't. He takes them out of school and drives them to Enchanted Gardens, keeping the truth from them the whole time.

Heidi isn't allowed to watch the news. This may surprise some people, but I wasn't, either. Frankly, nor should I have been. It's true that people during the world wars kept exhaustive track of battles, troop movements, and anything else they could get details about, and it's true that I despair that we don't know nearly so much as that today, almost seeming to forget that we still do actually have troops in Afghanistan. However, we didn't see their faces. No, the previous administration didn't allow pictures taken of body bags, but we did still see things more personal than just who had taken some tiny town in France no one had ever heard of. You see individuals, and it's made more real because of it. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic. (Just because he was an evil megalomaniac doesn't mean he wasn't right now and again!) Each of those faces makes the war almost intimate. Heidi, who is twelve but looks older, seems almost to be watching for her mother, which is not really something she needs to see on CNN.

I'm not sure the film would work without John Cusack. Even when he's in dreadful movies--a little too often these days--you're still inclined to like him. I can see him, in theory, playing a villain, but he'd still be a nice one, a charming, pleasant guy who just, you know, happened to be evil. He has also, since the days of Lloyd Dobler and earlier, been able to project emotion in an understated way. It's obvious that Stan is in enormous pain, but aside from one fit of weeping, he does his level best to keep it to himself. Of course, at least part of that is that he's trying to give the girls one last happy memory before they must bury their mother. Though I do wonder how happy it will actually be in retrospect, like the memory we have of Dad's last birthday present to Elaine. The memory of the hour or so between when we came home from school that afternoon and when Grandma and Aunt Susie came for us. It becomes clear that he's just pushing away the moment when he'd have to acknowledge it to himself, and that could have become mawkish if played by a different actor.

The great war-themed movies have almost never come during the war in question. This is leaving aside such obvious wars as the Revolutionary and Civil. (There are no great films about the Spanish-American or Mexican-American Wars.) However, there are always exceptions, and it's generally true that at least some films from within the actual time period stick out. This is not high art; if not mawkish, it's definitely sentimental, almost but not quite to a fault. There's a war-themed movie apparently in strong consideration for a lot of Oscars this year, and when I see it, I will let you know. (It's on my Netflix; there will doubtless be a long list as soon as it's available.) Hardly anyone seems to have heard of this one, and I think that's a shame. It's a quiet movie, and the actual war is almost unimportant. Stan fights with his brother, John (Alessandro Nivola), who is opposed to the war--but didn't vote. But in the end, where Grace went doesn't matter. Just that she is gone.