Avoiding Grief in Grace Is Gone

There's no denying that Strouse is a better manipulator than he is a filmmaker. Low-budget or not, you will find few movies this year more poorly photographed and edited than this one, while the sperformances of the two child actresses rank among the camera-mugging extremes of television sitcoms and cereal commercials. Cusack, who also helped to produce the film, mugs for the camera in a different way, burying himself under layers of camouflage—bad comb-over hairdo, gut spilling over his waistline, rumpled Members Only jacket—in the time-honored fashion of actors who feel they haven't been taken seriously enough. (Think Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys.) His Stanley is supposed to be a former soldier himself, so eager to enlist that he cheated his way through an eye exam, yet there's not one atom of this man's potato-sack posture and dishwater demeanor to suggest that he would have passed muster as a Cub Scout. What old Grace saw in him, we'll never know.