"Grace is Gone" is a very sad, but important film. Until I read about it on IMDb, I had no idea that it was being made. Very subtley, it slipped in and out of theaters. Finally, I found it at Blockbuster and picked it up to watch with my family. At the end, my family remarked on how sad the movie is. They are very right with this comment. In fact, this may be one of the saddest, but beautiful films I've ever seen. It takes a situation that every parent may face and turns it into a beautiful story about family and love.

Stanley Phillips is a dad taking care of his two daughters while their wife and mother, Grace, is in Iraq in the Army. When the news comes one day that Grace has been killed overseas, Stanley is left alone and clueless as to how to tell his daughters that their mother is not coming home. As a way of avoiding the conversation, Stanley takes the girls on a trip to Enchanted Gardens, an amusement park that looks similar to Disney World.

The plot, with Clint Eastwood's beautiful score and James Strouse's great writing and directing, brings the viewer a subtle and beautiful film. "Grace is Gone" definitely stays with the viewer.

9/10

John Cusack plays Stanley Phillips, an employee at Home Store whose soldier wife (the Grace of the title) was killed during the Iraq War. Naturally, he's devastated, but at the same time, he's unable to tell their two daughters (Shelan O'Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk) what happened. Instead, he takes them on a road trip (with the theme park Enchanted Gardens the intended destination),determined to inject some fun and spontaneity into their lives.

Debuting director James C. Strouse never tries to truly politicize his story, which is appreciable. He limits this element to one conversation between Stanley and his slovenly brother John (Alessandro Nivola). Really, "Grace is Gone" is much more about love, and loss, and how people cope, or don't cope, with tragedy in their lives. Ultimately, it does work because it does have compassion for its characters. One could argue that Stanley is behaving irrationally, but he does acknowledge, in his own way, that he doesn't really know what he's doing. Both the journey and the destination in this tale carry equal weight; we know Stanley is going to *have* to tell the girls the truth at some point, so we watch and wait for him to reach that point of readiness.

Cusack does a very fine job here, in one of his best performances. O'Keefe and Bednarczyk are endearing and convincing, managing to avoid being overly cutesy, for the most part. Nivola is fine in his brief time on screen. Marisa Tomei and Mary Kay Place have roles so brief that one *really* has to pay attention in order to catch them at all.

Strouse, the writer of the film, stepped up to the plate after original director Rob Reiner left the project. His storytelling is pretty succinct; "Grace is Gone" manages to wrap up in a trim 86 minutes. The lovely music score is courtesy of Clint Eastwood, his first credit in this capacity where he didn't also direct the picture in question.

All in all, this is a good picture that wins emotional reactions from the audience fairly honestly; it rarely gets overly sentimental or manipulative.

Seven out of 10.

GRACE IS GONE (2007) *** John Cusack, Shelan O'Keefe, Gracie Bednarczyk, Alessandro Nivola, Marisa Tomei. Cusack, in one of his strongest performances, stars as a father of two young daughters who learns their mother, a soldier away in the Iraq war, has been killed, and his paralyzing fear of telling them the news leads to an unlikely road trip instead. Novice filmmaker James C. Strouse, who also penned the screenplay, displays remarkable restraint in what could easily have been a mawkish TV movie with skill and Cusack delivers the goods in a low-key yet heartbreaking turn. The political underpinnings are not belabored and the young actresses balance out the tragic plottings.