DOES John Cusack understand the difference between “Republican” and “mildly retarded”? I’m not sure he does. I am willing to concede the cate gories are not mutually exclusive.
Cusack’s indie “Grace Is Gone,” which is likely to be his second flop in as many months, is a barbell of a movie that carries some weight at either end. What’s in between is purely utilitarian, though.
Cusack is Stanley, a superstore manager raising two daughters alone because his wife, Grace, is serving in Iraq. At the beginning of the film, he gets the dreaded visit from two solemn Army officers who regret to inform him that she was killed in action.
In a small town like Stanley’s, this information would instantly be front-page stuff and lead the TV and radio news broadcasts; the girls’ friends from school would know, and their cellphones would be buzzing with texts and phone calls.
None of this happens in this strange movie, nor do the girls check their e-mail, for one reason: Cusack and writer-director James Strouse think it would be a cute acting exercise if Stanley were so numbed with grief that, instead of telling the kids, he loaded them in a car and volunteered to drive them on a joyless trip to a distant theme park. Call it “National Lampoon’s Wartime Vacation.”
The military is so foreign to this movie that, in backstory, we learn that Stanley faked his way through the Army for a while despite horrendous vision. (The Army has these features called “rifles,” and you have to be able to fire them well enough to hit “targets” . . . never mind.) If his vision is that bad, how does he drive? Does the movie think the Army won’t accept you if you wear glasses?
As you will have guessed going in, the message is anti-war; a couple of subsidiary characters get to deliver familiar rants about it, and Stanley, a patriot and a conservative, responds feebly.
Just to underscore that Stanley is a miserably benighted fella, Cusack shuffles around like Rain Man, wrestles his sentences out of the back of his throat and wears windshield-size nerd glasses and pleated khakis. All of this, though, is insufficiently geeky enough to say “Republican,” so Cusack tops it off with 99-cent clip-on sunshades. He doesn’t use them; he just keeps them propped up on his head as a billboard of yokelism.
Lack of restraint applies across the board. When Cusack calls an answering machine to hear his dead wife’s voice, it’s touching. When he leaves her messages, it becomes cutesy. When he starts asking her for advice, the word is cloying.
Cusack’s strenuous acting doesn’t fill the holes in the movie: It’s difficult to get emotionally involved in the death of a character we never meet, and it isn’t news (or entertainment, or art) that it hurts to lose a loved one, in war or any other way.
GRACE IS GONE
Running time: 85 minutes. Rated PG-13 (adult themes, profanity, teen smoking). At the Sunshine and the Lincoln Square.