Entertainment

‘Grace’ notes

On the morning of October 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts inexplicably entered a quiet Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and shot 10 Amish girls execution-style, killing five of them.

Perhaps even more inexplicable was the response of the Amish to the murders of their innocent children: forgiveness.

Lifetime Movie Network’s “Amish Grace” looks at the tragedy from the perspective of the Grabers, a fictional Amish family whose child is killed. But it also considers the perspective of the killer’s widow (Roberts committed suicide after shooting the girls) whose named has been changed to Amy to respect her privacy.

Based on the book with the same title by Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, David L. Weaver-Zercher, the movie shows both Amy Roberts and Ida Graber struggle not just to forgive Roberts, but to understand why they must forgive him for their own sake.

Rather than film in Pensylvania’s Amish country, the producers opted to go on location to exotic Agoura Hills, Ca., just north of Los Angeles.

“This is more than a movie, it’s an inspirational thought,” says executive producer Larry A. Thompson, who optioned the rights to the book after hearing a report on PBS’ “Bill Moyers Journal” when “Amish Grace” was published.

“The book is written by three Amish scholars who tell you the facts of what happened and then explain what the Amish believe about forgiveness,” says Thompson.

“In dramatizing it, it was important to see it through the eyes of a character. We couldn’t base it on a real Amish character – because of their beliefs they cannot be portrayed in the media – so we created a character who, we feel, takes the audience through this emotional arc in a way that’s very real and understandable, yet at the same time protects the privacy of the Amish.”

That character is Ida, played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley. She goes through the stages of grief with the audience when she learns her 14-year-old daughter, Mary Beth, has been killed. The very day of the murders, Ida’s husband, Gideon, accompanies the Amish elders to Roberts’ home to offer their unconditional forgiveness,

As Gideon (Matt Letscher) tells his remaining daughter, Katie (Karley Scott Collins): “Hate is a very hungry thing. If you let it, it will eat up your heart until there’s no more room for love.”

Still, Ida can’t understand forgiving the man that took away her daughter.

Amy, played by Tammy Blanchard, can’t wrap her head around it either. As she says of her husband, “He chose to go to hell instead of stay here with me.”

“This movie is about learning to forgive and it really shows what happens within you when you can’t forgive,” says Blanchard, 33, who won an Emmy for her performance as the young Judy Garland in “Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows.” “I just felt that this was one of these stories that could offer the healing of forgiveness to anyone suffering from the loss of a child,” she says.

In playing the part, Blanchard says she also realized she needed to learn the lesson of forgiveness.

“My mother was attacked by her husband when I was 13 years old. He basically tried to murder her,” she says. Blanchard’s stepfather went to jail for four years and is out of her family’s life, but the actress says, “It took me a long time to get over it. In playing Amy Roberts, a lot of that came up for me.”

“As actors, we have a responsibility to share our stories and stories like this one,” says Blanchard. “It’s important to get people to laugh, to cry, and let it out. A lot of these channels don’t do that anymore but Lifetime does.”