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. But once Cusack walked in, looking and moving exactly like John Cusack, the Egon-Spengler-esque critics hogging the front of the table set in, and for forty-five minutes it was impossible to get in a question. The one I finally got in was this: "You have a large, rabid cultish fan base that is predominantly young people who don’t yet have families, and also have very strong opinions about the war. What do you want your younger fans to take away from this? How do you think they’ll relate to this?"
"I don't really know what they'll take away. Hopefully, as more of being conscious. Consciousness. Compassionate," said John Cusack.
Softballed! And that's appropriate for a promo of Grace is Gone — a thirty-mile-per-hour softball, right down the middle.
— John Constantine