Grace Is Gone (2007)

John Cusack is in this one, so we thought, okay 80/20 odds it was a good one.  And it was good.  I wasn’t so sure in the beginning, but then it started to pick up.  In the beginning, it seemed like it was going to be a very dry film with only extremely humourless behaviour.  But it picked up and you could really begin to warm up to the characters.

This film is about a Home Store manager (is that a real store?), Stanley Philipps, who learns his wife passes away in the war in Iraq.  They are meant to represent real middle-America.  The average family.  But with a twist in that it is the wife who is the soldier, not the father.  I kept wondering if he was going to go totally wacko and do something really stupid.  But he keeps it together and ends up proving himself a great father to his 2 daughters.  It was funny (but also painful to see him going through the humiliation) seeing him at a support group of people with spouses fighing in Iraq.  He, of course, was the only man. 

One weak point in the plot was about the older daughter, who is 12.  She and her younger sister of 8 are constantaly worried about their mother.  They know she is in the far and that people are dying there.  And she knows something is wrong when her father starts to act irratically.  And she’s not a dumb girl.  So why doesn’t she ask her father if something is wrong and if it has something to do with their mother?  If I were a girl of 12 that is what I would do!

Yes, yet another Hollywood anti-war/anti-government statement, but more than that.  It was about a man’s/father’s struggle in a time of great loss and crisis and how he deals with it.  This one gets 8 out of 10.