Personality goes a long way in film. In fact, there have
over the decades been many movie stars who’ve leaned on their own inherent
individual personas far more than any tradecraft secrets for success. Guile and
changeability count for something, but so too does simply being comfortable in
one’s skin and having some small measure of charm or grace to share.

John Cusack is a wonderful case in point. Known for his intelligence,
sense of humor, slightly mannered delivery and yet still offbeat nature, he’s
crafted a damn fine career mainly in the shadows, playing wary unconventional
types with dry wit and, occasionally, drier ambition. Along the way, he’s
scrupulously avoided the tabloids. Hair slicked back, he’s also nursed a monochromatic
fashion sense (“the artist wears black”) born of his upbringing in the bosom of
the Chicago theater scene — where
he grew up, along with his siblings, on the fringe of the industry under the
tutelage of his actor-filmmaker father. Since then he’s parceled out just
enough dollops of conventionalized charisma to keep a loyal fan base
(particularly the women) hooked. While he hasn’t merely played the same
character over and over (movies like Max, Being
John Malkovich and Cradle
Will Rock are proof of that), Cusack has traded heartily on iterations
on a theme, leaning on an off-screen personality equal parts enigmatic and
genial.

In two movies this fall, though, Cusack has taken
significant strides away from the quietly easygoing, “Johnny Trenchcoat”
persona that has earned him his bread and butter — first in November’s Martian Child, still
in release in some areas, and now in writer-director
James C. Strouse’s Grace Is Gone,
which played in competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year,
and picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. In the latter, Cusack is nearly
unrecognizable. Combing his hair forward in a conservative ’do, and sporting
owlish Aviator-style glasses that would have last passed for fashionable in
perhaps the first Bush administration (and only then in traditionalist circles),
Cusack plays Stanley Phillips, a father who must figure out a way to deliver
the news to his two daughters that their mother, a soldier serving in Iraq, has
been killed in action.

Although a loving father, Stanley
is unable to conform to the more affectionate role of maternal caregiver, and is
equally out of sorts away from home and his girls — conveyed in an early scene (above) where he sits
uncomfortably in a deep-set, plush chair at a support group meeting for
military spouses, avoiding sharing his feelings. The sudden news of his wife’s
death merely casts everything in starker detail. Desperate to delay telling the
children, he takes 12-year-old Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn
(Gracie Bednarczyk) on a spontaneous road trip to Enchanted Gardens, a Disney-esque theme park
in Florida. Along the way they stop off to visit the girls’ grandmother,
who isn’t home; instead, the trio crosses paths with Stanley’s
shiftless brother John (Alessandro Nivola, delivering some fine work), who has
significant disagreements with his brother about politics and life in general.
With their father abandoning his taskmaster ways, Heidi intuits something is
wrong, and eventually begins to figure out more of the specifics, but not
before one last day of sunshine for Stanley and the girls.

In the end, Grace Is Gone is a solid but
still somewhat flawed film, most notable for how it serves its star, and vice
versa. Part of the unwritten contract of a movie that centers around a
character who’s internalized all their emotions is that said character then
must be confronted with other characters aggravating and contradicting that
desire for quietude, and for just a bit too much of its brief running time Grace is Gone doesn’t present us
with front-burner interpersonal conflict. The movie’s ending, meanwhile, tells us how to feel rather
than showing us a moment it’s earned on its own.

What we have, then, is a curious case of a sort of “grief
peep show,” an episodic drama with a lot hidden in its middle. Still, with his too-short pants and understandably frazzled
countenance, Cusack delivers in this film something different than we’ve seen
from him before, or at least in a long, long time. Both the fact that Grace Is Gone picked up the
Audience Award at Sundance and was amongst the most hotly bid upon films
seeking out distribution at the festival are indicative of just how
much effectively poignant weight this sort of change-up from Cusack carries.
Pinning its inaugural Oscar season hopes on the movie, the Weinstein Company
hopes mainstream audiences feel the same. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.