The premise of James C. Strouse's directorial debut Grace is Gone is resoundingly sad. Stanley Phillips (John Cusack, with a bad haircut and ill-fitting aviator glasses) learns that his wife Grace, a solider in Iraq, has been killed. He's left alone with the difficult task of raising two daughters, somber twelve-year-old Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) and manic eight-year-old Heidi (Shélan O'Keefe). The very idea is too painful for Stanley to contemplate, so much so that the overwhelmed father finds himself unable to tell his girls the news. Instead, he takes them on a road trip.
As the Phillips family leaves their Midwestern home and drives to the Emerald Gardens amusement park in Florida, conversation becomes increasingly complicated. Not a single line of dialogue can be taken on the surface level: what Dad knows and can't say, what precocious Dawn begins to perceive and won't admit.
Along the way, stopping in all places American -- tacky chain hotels and restaurants, discount shopping emporiums -- Stanley finds himself constantly breaking his own rules. He buys the girls things they don't need and allows them to stay up late watching TV; because they no longer have a mother, it is Stanley who now helps them pick out dresses and lets them get their ears pierced even though their mother had insisted they wait until they were older.
Strouse, who also wrote the screenplay for the understated and lovely Lonesome Jim, received the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival for Grace is Gone. The earnest film also received the Audience Award for Best Drama. While I admire the film's premise and recognize the quality of the performances, especially the daughters who are both making their debuts, I found myself increasingly irritated as the film headed to its inevitable, heart rending conclusion.
A syrupy-sweet, cloying score by Clint Eastwood overwhelms the otherwise elegant simplicity of Strouse's storytelling. When a young mother dies at war, when a grieving father curls into a fetal position on a bed and weeps, an audience knows how to feel. But instead of trusting our intelligence, swelling theme music drowns out the impact of the climatic moment the entire film has been building up to.
