Grace is Gone is a bad movie with a halfway decent premise that could have succeeded if it weren’t so damn cowardly. John Cusack plays a conservative father of two, a patriot with a shameful military past who receives word at the beginning of the film that his soldier wife has died in Iraq. The rest of the ninety-minute runtime follows his struggle to find a way to tell his daughters, aged twelve and eight, that their mother is dead. There’s an opportunity here to say something about the half-decade war we remain embroiled in, and director/writer James Strouse studiously avoids saying it. The Iraq War could be subbed out for any conflict from the past fifty years and the same limp story could be told. What’s even more frustrating is that Grace is Gone's line-toeing is intentional — it's a film, on a political subject, so desperate not to offend that it avoids politics completely.
It is short though. That was nice.
When I arrived at a roundtable Q&A with Cusack, all I was armed with was a fresh blank tape and a burning desire to know why this man hated Better Off Dead.
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