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Beyond the Lens
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John Cusack's Paternal Grace
It’s been a year of very solid parental performances for actor John Cusack, what with 1408, Martian Child and now, Grace is Gone.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 10:45 AM
By Brent Simon
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Weinstein Co.
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Grieving father
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Personality goes a long way on film. In fact, there have been over the decades many movie stars who’ve relied for success far more on their own inherent individual personas than any tradecraft secrets. Guile and changeability count for something, but so too does simply being comfortable in one’s skin and having some small measure of charm or grace to share.
John Cusack is a wonderful case in point. Known for his intelligence, sense of humor, slightly mannered delivery and yet still offbeat nature, he’s crafted a damn fine career mainly in the shadows, playing wary unconventional types with dry wit and, occasionally, drier ambition. Along the way, he’s scrupulously avoided the tabloids.
Hair slicked back, he’s also nursed a monochromatic fashion sense (‘The artist wears black’) born of his upbringing in the bosom of the Chicago theater scene, where he grew up, along with his siblings, on the fringe of the industry under the tutelage of his actor-filmmaker father. Since then, he’s parceled out just enough dollops of conventionalized charisma to keep a loyal fan base (particularly the women) hooked.
But he hasn’t merely been playing the same character over and over (movies like Max, Being John Malkovich and Cradle Will Rock are proof of that). Instead, Cusack has traded heartily on iterations on a theme, leaning on an off-screen personality equal parts enigmatic and genial.
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New Line Cinema
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Sensitive father
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In two movies this fall, though, Cusack has taken significant strides away from the quietly easygoing, “Johnny Trenchcoat” persona that has earned him his bread and butter. First, in November’s adaptation Martian Child, still in release, Cusack played David Gordon, a bestselling, widowed science-fiction writer who decides to adopt a precariously remote young boy, Dennis, who’s built up a façade by insisting that he’s from outer space.
Though the movie never gets down to psychological brass tacks by piercing the bubble of Dennis’ behavior in specific, diagnostic fashion, the easy rapport between Cusack and his young co-star is inviting. It’s something of a change-up from the actor, who eschews any of the caginess and smirk he typically injects, in varied amounts, into almost all his performances. The fun interplay with his real-life sister and co-star might well be expected, but the fact that Cusack has worked with almost all of the other actors with whom he shares significant Martian Child screen time - Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Anjelica Huston and Richard Schiff among them - also gives the movie a genuine sense of rootedness.
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Dimension Films
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Spooked father
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In his current, however, Cusack takes things even further, wholly abandoning his “Johnny Trenchcoat” persona. Dropped into writer-director James C. Strouse’s Grace is Gone, which picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Cusack is nigh unrecognizable. Combing his hair forward in a conservative ’do, and sporting owlish Aviator-style glasses that would have last passed for fashionable in perhaps the first Bush administration (and only then in traditionalist circles), Cusack plays Stanley Phillips, a father who must figure out a way to deliver the news to his two daughters that their mother, a soldier serving in Iraq, has been killed in action.
Although a caring father, Stanley is unable to conform to the more affectionate role of maternal caregiver, and is equally out of sorts away from home - conveyed in an early scene where he sits uncomfortably in a deep-set, plush chair at a support group meeting for military spouses, avoiding sharing his feelings. The sudden news of his wife’s death merely casts everything in starker detail.
Desperate to delay telling the children, he takes 12-year-old Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) on a spontaneous road trip to Enchanted Gardens, a Disney-esque theme park in Florida. Along the way, they stop off to visit the girls’ grandmother, who isn’t home; instead, the trio crosses paths with Stanley’s shiftless brother John (Alessandro Nivola, delivering some fine work), who has significant disagreements with his brother about politics and life in general. With their father abandoning his taskmaster ways, Heidi intuits something is wrong, and eventually begins to figure out more of the specifics, but not before one last day of sunshine for Stanley and the girls.
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First Look
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Straight to DVD father, via this past July's The Contract
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With his too-short pants and understandably frazzled countenance, Cusack delivers in this film something different than we’ve seen from him before, or at least in a long, long time. In the end, Grace is Gone is a solid but still somewhat flawed film, most notable for how it serves its star, and vice versa.
Part of the unwritten contract of a movie that centers around a character who’s internalized all their emotions is that said character then must be confronted with other characters aggravating and contradicting that desire for quietude. For just a bit too much of its brief running time, Grace is Gone doesn’t present us with front-burner interpersonal conflict. The movie’s ending, meanwhile, tells us how to feel rather than showing us a moment it’s earned on its own.
What we have, then, is a curious case of a sort of “grief peep show,” an episodic drama with a lot hidden in its middle. We watch Cusack catch Heidi smoking with an older boy at a motel; we watch him go through heartache and sorrow, leaving answering machine messages for his wife asking for her help in how to break the news to their daughters.
Both the fact that Grace is Gone picked up the Audience Award at Sundance and was amongst the most hotly bid upon films seeking out distribution at the festival, though, are indicative of just how much effectively poignant weight this sort of change-up from Cusack carries. Pinning its inaugural Oscar season hopes on the movie, the Weinstein Company hopes mainstream audiences feel the same.
Alas, the public’s ongoing aversion to Iraq war themed movies may be even too much for the fan base of Cusack. In 63 theaters this past opening weekend, Grace is Gone grossed only $15,264.
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