'Grace is Gone' will make you cry -- because it stinks

You'd think a movie about a grief-stricken father struggling to find the courage to tell his young daughters that their mother is dead would be emotionally wrenching. Then add in the fact that his wife died while serving her country in Iraq.

Yet "Grace Is Gone" doesn't make you sad; it elicits more jeers than tears, as writer-director James C. Strouse invests more in political views than human insight. Heck, I'm not even sure Stanley Philips, the dopey dad played by John Cusack, is even human.

He certainly doesn't behave like one, especially around his kids, 12-year-old Heidi (Shelan O'Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk), to whom he remains distant if not disconnected. He's bitter, you see, over being booted from the Army because of his poor eyesight (metaphor alert!).

It's left him depressed and a tad emasculated - his wife, who he met in the service, is in the thick of battle while he's stuck leading a battalion of underachievers as the manager of a Home Depot.

This, of course, requires Cusack to mope like he's never moped before. He's good at it, too. But it makes his character appear so self-involved that it's almost impossible to feel empathy for him or his plight after his wife is killed by an IED and he's left to pick up the pieces of his shattered dreams.

The girls, though, are another story. Them, you care about. The two terrific young actresses convey the fear and loneliness of their characters in rich and subtle tones.

You just wish they didn't have such a cowardly jerk for a father. What kind of dad is too afraid to tell his kids that they no longer have a mother? Would he rather they learn it from their friends, their principal, the TV news?

In Stanley's case, he'd rather they never heard it at all. So he does what any responsible parent would do: He yanks them out of school, loads them in the car and heads south to Florida to visit an amusement park. Enchanted Gardens, to be exact.

Strouse couches the trip as a desperate attempt by a father looking to prolong the innocence of his children, but it's really just an ineffectual gimmick for him to protest both the war and slackening American values, particularly a perceived corporate takeover of the government.

We see it in the succession of Wal-Marts, Home Depots and various other box-store chains that litter the American landscape.

It's a compelling theory, and one that would likely make for an excellent movie - if it were in the hands of a more competent filmmaker than Strouse, whose only previous experience was writing the script for Steve Buscemi's "Lonesome Jim," a flick I equate with a slow crawl through hell.

While "Grace" is a significant step up from that, it still lacks scope and grit, two things Strouse really needs to work on, along with his painfully predictable dialogue. On more than a dozen occasions, I found myself reciting the next line before the actors even opened their mouths.

That's almost as big a letdown as the scene when Stanley finally delivers the sad news to his kids. You'd think after 90 minutes of build up that Strouse might make us privy to Stanley's strong, sensitive words, but he instead chooses to drown out the film's most powerful moment with a crappy pop song. What was he thinking? Did he decide to personally begin the writers' strike a year early?

The movie could have been worse, though. A lot worse, if not for the performances by the three leads and the undervalued Alessandro Nivola as Stanley's hippie-dippy dead beat brother, who of course opposes the war and anything to do with the establishment - like finding a job. But, as good as they are, there's just no saving "Grace."

Grade: C

Rated PG-13. "Grace Is Gone" contains a small amount of bad language.