By Eric Kohn

Grace is Gone
Written & Directed by James Strouse


When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Grace is Gone signaled a landmark representation. Coming out now, it risks being perceived as an afterthought. The movie dramatizes a contemporary situation with utter specificity, following a devoutly conservative family man (John Cusack) through the immediate aftermath of his enlisted wife’s death in Iraq. That’s no longer completely untouched soil: While 9/11 was thoroughly revisited last year in mainstream storytelling with the double threat of World Trade Center and United 93, history may record 2007 at the movies as the Year of Iraqi Freedom.

Reverberations of the war caused a wave of angrily politicized narratives, each attempting a grandiose lesson about the motives or pratfalls of national loyalty: The Kingdom (which took place in Saudi Arabia, but clearly borrowed thematic cues from the latest overseas incursion) posited that both sides want to obliterate each other; Lions for Lambs nudged Americans to speak the language of patriotism; Brian De Palma’s Redacted took an unfortunately glib look at the ills of putting the democratization in the hands of grunts.

Grace is Gone, the directorial debut of Lonesome Jim scribe James Strouse, has a tighter scope (with only four main roles, not including the absent fifth one) and none of the didacticism of these heavy-handed projects—which makes it a much stronger work of art. Yet even its approachable one-line synopsis might come across to some as a slightly rearranged version of Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah.

Grace is Gone and Elah both tell stories of men dealing with the loss of close family members fighting in Iraq, but their strategies for tackling this new American malady differ greatly. Haggis gives us an aged army vet (Tommy Lee Jones) intent on finding his son’s murderer. As a result, it’s a lazy whodunit that uses the pretense of the war as an emotional crutch. Strouse’s meek protagonist faces a more credible challenge, faced with the daunting task of revealing to his prepubescent daughters that their mother won’t be coming home. In premise alone, Strouse’s movie is a more believable and deeply felt exploration of modern conflict than pretty much anything else this year.

Arriving in theaters with a fresh score by Clint Eastwood—a fan of the movie, he volunteered to compose new music prior to its release—Grace is Gone has a quaint, unpretentious vibe and never gets preachy. Sure, it’s a tearjerker with more than a few mushy moments of unhindered grief, but they match the situation. So does Cusack. Hiding his typically cool demeanor under wire frame glasses and a messy comb-over, he puts on his finest performance as lonely patriotic pop Stanley Phillips. He’s not a crude symbol of partisanship, nor does he get his comeuppance for supporting the war (in fact, the experience of losing his wife enhances his national allegiance). Taking his kids on an impulsive road trip to avoid having the big chat, Stanley encounters his indolent liberal brother, John (Alessandro Nivola), raising the tension of the scenario with a sudden clash of ideologies. But when John discovers Grace’s fate, his compassion supplants the need for political argumentation.
Some critics have alleged that Strouse’s decision to withhold Stanely’s painful revelation to his daughters is exploitative, but that’s basically a complaint about the situation, rather than its onscreen manifestation. The sense of discomfort speaks to the naturalism of Strouse’s script. The Iraq War as an element of American culture makes sense as a firmly low-key character study, rather than the overblown or misguided productions that have trickled out over the last several months. Before the wave of reductionism, Grace is Gone seemed like the model for war-at-home movies. At this point, it seems like the alternative.