There are two kinds of film critics: the ones who take notes, and those who don’t. I take notes during screenings primarily as a way of focusing the attention; my scribblings in the dark are often illegible anyway.
Watching Saving Grace, a small British film that has been something of a surprise hit in the United States, I didn’t take any notes at all. At the top of the page I wrote the movie’s title; the rest of the page is blank. Saving Grace is a perfectly enjoyable little comedy, but nothing in it made me fumble for my pen.
Brenda Blethyn (last seen in Little Voice) is Grace Trevethyn, a middle-aged, middle-class woman somewhere in middle England (actually, she’s in a Cornish seaside village, but you get the idea) who has just been widowed. To her shock, she discovers that her late husband was involved in all sorts of shady business deals and has lost what money he might have left her; in fact, her lovely country home and her gentle country life are under threat.
Meanwhile, we have met some of the supporting characters: Matthew (Craig Ferguson, also co-scriptor), part-time gravedigger and Grace’s gardener; Nicky (Valerie Edmond), his girlfriend, who happens to be a fisherperson by trade (interesting, that); Dr Bamford, the local doctor, played by Martin Clunes, whose face, so familiar from TV’s Men Behaving Badly, makes you laugh as soon as you see it. Those popping eyes, that petulant, puffy mouth – God made him a comic.
When first we see Matthew, he’s sucking on a spliff while he digs Grace’s departed hubby’s grave; after the funeral, he shares a big joint with Dr Bamford. This little English seaside town, in other words, seems to harbour its fair share of normal, ordinary dagga-smokers. They suffer the usual problems of supply; Matthew is trying to grow his own, with limited success. So it doesn’t take long (actually, it does take a while – the first half of the movie is paced like a quiet evening walk) for Matthew to suggest to green-fingered Grace that her greenhouse could be put to very profitable use, which would be a boon to the dagga-smokers of middle England as well as help her out of her financial hole.
Things develop fairly logically from there, with the story developing some tension when gangsters get involved, and the film picking up pace at the end with a bit of a madcap fling (which, it must be said, rather overstates the effects of weed-inhalation). It’s all good fun, placing itself neatly in the genre of English-village movies like Whisky Galore, with all the cosy charm that that implies. The characters are likeable, if often stereotyped (the aged vicar, the good-natured bobby), and their predicaments amusing. While hardly stretching the envelope of decorum, Blethyn is good as Grace, retaining her essential primness even as she commits to criminality.
It is said that excessive dagga-smoking leads to short-term memory loss, but you won’t need the help of a heap of Swazi to forget Saving Grace, diverting though it is in its mild way.