Running on Empty

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The New York Sun

In “Grace Is Gone,” James C. Strouse’s directorial debut, John Cusack has added pounds to his frame and adopted a hip-squaring limp and a slack-jawed expression to personify Stanley Phillips, a Minnesota father of two looking after his young daughters as his military reservist wife, Grace, serves in Iraq. The film’s script, written by Mr. Strouse, deals Stanley a go-nowhere job as a manager of a home supply store, an unpopular pro-war political stance, and a backstory that includes his own discharge from the army for failing an eye exam.

We meet Stanley as he is scolding a support group for military spouses for unabashedly sharing how much they physically miss their better halves. Stanley is not just the only one present who won’t talk about sex — he’s the only one who isn’t a woman. At home, he catches his older daughter Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe) watching news reports from Iraq, something forbidden under his roof, and uses the dinner table as a pulpit from which to upbraid her for falling asleep at school. Unaware of his oldest child’s need for patient understanding, immune to his youngest daughter Dawn’s (Gracie Bednarczyk) energetic precocity, and bereft of any discernible sense of humor, Stanley might accurately be described as a jerk. When the dreaded duo of Army captain and Army chaplain arrive at his door to inform Stanley that he is now also a widower, it’s almost as if he asked for it.

With clarity fallen prey to grief and resolve coming to him in random bursts, Stanley, rather than seeking counsel on how to impart the worst possible news to his daughters, decides to put off telling them for as long as possible. In a manic moment of poor judgment, he upgrades a family trip to the mall into an unplanned impromptu vacation to a Florida amusement park. Before you can say “Sundance,” we’re on the road with a troubled American family. If a machine existed that could turn good intentions into power, “Grace is Gone” might provide enough juice to cut the planet in half. But as in similarly pitched, Midwest-set, blue-collar populated contemporary upscale indies, this film’s tone is a difficult sell. Mr. Strouse struggles to create an image of the heartland that’s light on irony, but there’s an icky condescension that creeps in around the film’s edges. You might experience the same discomforting sensation while watching “Grace Is Gone” as you would if you overheard a man dominating a woman in conversation by espousing his own pro-feminist dogma. “On the news they’re saying we attacked the wrong people,” Heidi says to her father, questioning his blanket support of the war. That may be true in the parallel universe in which “Grace Is Gone” takes place. In my world, the TV news is content to track super bacteria and Lindsay Lohan and leave judgment of the war to the administration.

Perhaps because of the contrasting unaffectedness of his two young costars, Mr. Cusack’s chino-clad, mouth-breathing, chronically empathy-free dad just doesn’t add up. His performance quickly loses its novelty and his alternately honking and singsonging accent and curious dumbfounded pout become more like props than traits. The actor seems less a character than a nominee on “The Cyrus Dewey Awards,” an Oscar broadcast lampoon on HBO’s “Mr. Show,” in which movie stars are rewarded for making the “brave choice” to portray the handicapped.

The following might be considered a spoiler. If you wish to view “Grace Is Gone” free of any foreknowledge of its surprising take on an unsurprising ending, read no further.

Inevitably of course, Stanley must fess up and tell the girls their mother has died. But bizarrely and unaccountably, as Stanley finally works up the nerve, the camera moves to the side and Clint Eastwood’s (yes, that one) score wells up to obliterate the words that this most self-deluding, inarticulate, and emotionally remote of fathers has finally found to share the truth, his grief, and his feelings with his daughters. It is a moment of narrative perversity worthy of Austrian cinema provocateur Michael Haneke. Emboldened by the time he’s shared with his children on the road, Stanley finally finds a way to speak his heart to Heidi and Dawn. But “Grace Is Gone” abandons us when we need it the most.


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