Lacking Grace

John Cusack enters the Iraq weepstakes

A A A Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Wednesday, Dec 5 2007

There’s no denying, though, that Strouse (who makes his directorial debut here, having previously written the screenplay for Steve Buscemi’s Lonesome Jim)is a better manipulator than he is a filmmaker. Low budget or not, you will find few movies this year more poorly photographed and edited than this one, while the performances of the two child actresses rank among the camera-mugging extremes of television sitcoms and cereal commercials. Cusack, who also helped to produce the film, mugs for the camera in a different way, burying himself under layers of camouflage — bad comb-over hairdo, gut spilling over his waistline, rumpled Members Only jacket — in the time-honored fashion of actors who feel they haven’t been taken seriously enough and want to make sure we know they can really Act. (Think Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys.)His Stanley is supposed to be a former soldier himself, so eager to enlist that he cheated his way through an eye exam, yet there’s not one atom of this man’s potato-sack posture and dishwater demeanor to suggest that he would have passed muster as a Cub Scout. What old Grace saw in him, we’ll never know.

GRACE IS GONE | Written and directed by JAMES C. STROUSE | Produced by JOHN CUSACK, GRACE LOH, GALT NIEDERHOFFER, CELINE RATTRAY and DANIELA TAPLIN LUNDBERG | Released by The Weinstein Company | Century City 15, Sunset 5