There’s a category of movie we may designate as “This should be on TV”. That’s not quite the same as “It should be a TV movie”, because the TV movie is a specific genre, or at least a form with certain traits: it’s small-scale, deals with frequently worthy-but-dull issues such as adoption, in vitro fertilisation, adultery, divorce and refugees.
There’s no way to make this kind of thing interesting unless you turn it into a court case (a great staple of television), or you focus on the emotions of the people going through the relevant crisis. Sometimes it seems that the TV movie is a ghetto for what used to be called, in the High Hollywood days, “the women’s picture”.
As a category, “This should be on TV” is similar, when it comes to evaluation, to the “You might as well wait for it to be on TV” conclusion. This is in turn related to “Wait for the DVD”, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a TV movie, just that it’s not a big-screen movie: there’s no visual content that insists upon its being seen on a screen 10m wide. OK, that goes for about 80% to 90% of what we see on our 10m screens, but let’s let that go for now.
My view as a critic who goes to roughly 150 previews in a year is that perhaps two or three movies in that year actually demand to be seen on a big screen. Maybe potential moviegoers are beginning to realise that, and hence the ongoing year-on-year drop in box office at movie theatres. (As you may have noticed, they are closing like flies in South Africa.)
At any rate, the evaluative category of “Wait for the DVD” is only one step above the “Wait for it to be on TV” category. I can’t count how many movies I’ve reviewed and had to stop myself writing that you can happily wait for the DVD, or even for it to pop up on TV. Surely that’s why the American movie industry, and hence ours (since we are largely a cinematic colony thereof), depends on “event movies” or “tentpole movies” to get moviegoers into theatres; the “tentpole” designation is of course an echo of the circus. There has to be some sense of urgency in getting to see the thing, as well as, hopefully, a sense that this has to be seen on a big screen.
“Always better on the big screen,” our film distributors keep telling us, but in fact that is seldom true. At least on DVD it’s in focus, and you don’t have to listen to it through the static of others munching popcorn.
All that is a lengthy prelude to a consideration of Grace Is Gone, I think easily slotted into the “TV movie” category, as well as that of “Wait for it to be on TV” — which is not to say it’s a bad movie.
It is the story of a father and his two daughters and the road trip he spontaneously embarks upon to avoid telling them that their soldier mom has been killed in Iraq. It thus humanises issues such as the US invasion of Iraq (from the American viewpoint, at least), as well as touching gently on the political and ideological ramifications back home.
John Cusack plays the dad, and as I’ve often said he’s an estimable actor (though I’m glad I missed what is by all accounts a staggeringly dud addition to his oeuvre, namely The Martian Child). In Grace Is Gone he does some marvellous and serious acting work: he’s acutely sensitive to the needs of the role, emotionally as well as physically. He’s edgy, undecided, grief-stricken, tender as well as tough, with one moment on a pay phone that is quite beautiful in its poignancy. He wears bad spectacles and displays a pigeon-toed walk that says as much about the character as anything else. He has even abandoned his habitual cinematic (and I suspect extracinematic) garb, the long black coat.
Cusack’s work here is balanced very adroitly by the young actors playing his daughters, and in this instance at least disproves the old adage advising actors that they perform with children at their peril.
Cusack holds his own magnificently. Sheelan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk are Heidi and Dawn respectively: at 12, Heidi’s just hitting adolescence and Dawn is a free-spirited eight-year-old. O’Keefe is a precise mixture of restraint and watchful anxiety; Bednarczyk is delightfully rambunctious, except for a key moment of sudden withdrawal. In her case I suspect this is not so much acting as being.
Why, then, relegate Grace Is Gone to TV-movie status? It’s got great acting, as I say, and it’s not a bad film; if its narrative arc has a problem, it’s that we soon see what the climax has to be, so there’s no surprise, just an agonising wait. And, for me, Cusack’s moment on the pay phone was infinitely more touching than the final revelation, to which, by the time it arrives, one has been hardened.
Grace Is Gone does not beg to be seen on the big screen: it looks like it should be on TV, though the bland, beige cinematography presumably helps to communicate the fact that we’re deep in suburban Middle America, in all senses of that term. Smallness is part of its strength as a movie, and any pretences to big-screen grandiosity do it a disservice.