I haven't seen this movie. But those comments strike me as tone deaf as Bush's declaration that:"You're either for us or against us."
# posted by Anonymous @ 1/25/2007 10:49 PM  

 
I haven't seen the film either, but I tip my hat to Mike Ryan and the points that he made. A war film that deals with "grief" and all of our lovely, "universal' human emotions yet doesn't comment directly about the war
in a negative way simply seems like the same old same old art within capitalism. This 'grief' is unnecessary and there are people who are directly to blame for it. Enough is enough already. It's not a time for ambiguities. And it is not a time to be silent. Bush was talking about 'for or against' a WAR which is clearly stupid. Mike Ryan was writing about art that is falling short in communicating what desperately needs to be clearly communicated.
# posted by Anonymous @ 1/25/2007 11:56 PM  

 
We already had the film you're describing. It was called Fahrenheit 9/11 and it sucked. Without ambiguity there is no depth. There is no mystery. You're left with didactic, disposable art. I'm not for the war in the slightest. Bush was speaking in B&W terms. It's not what he was talking about, but HOW he was talking. When opinions are on only one side or the other, without any middle ground, there is no conversation. Just dueling monologues.
# posted by Anonymous @ 1/26/2007 12:13 AM  

 
I agree with everything that you are saying. In fact, what you are expressing is probablly quite obvious to anyone with a discerning mind. No one is going to argue for didactic, black and white, moralist films.
The point that was being made, if I understood correctly, is that we should be careful about what is being communicated and taken away from our Art. I couldn't agree more. There are tons and tons of narrative film from the 60's and 70's that are of the highest intellectual and aesthetic quality that one would never walk away from wondering if it was pro or against Vietnam. The same with the music of the time. Clearly nothing was compromised. The artists were not afraid to take a stand at the sake of profit because of the passion and rage they felt. There is a continuum of ideas, ethics, and politics to be discussed and where we draw the line of the discussion is of concern. Black and white, good guys and bad guys, is generally reserved for bad Hollywood films.
# posted by Anonymous @ 1/26/2007 11:30 AM  

 
I have seen the film and did listen to the Q&A afterwards. Interestingly, comments 1 and 3 above reflect what the filmmakers behind “Grace is Gone” wished to convey. They wanted to avoid polemics, the “dueling monologues” of left and right, of being “with us or against us.” They hoped to suggest that whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, the war brings loss and grief. That sounds like solid “middle ground,” nice and neutral space because it pretends to be entirely silent on the politics of the war itself. But it does not reflect the full story of the film and the full story of the film is not neutral, nor is it silent about politics.

In the opening lines of his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, to explain why he has come to Riverside Church to speak up about the war, Martin Luther King Jr. says, "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

His words apply to "Grace is Gone" in two major ways that define the main character and the politics of the film.

First, it takes John Cusack’s character the entire length of the film to break his silence about his wife and his daughters’ mother’s death; to stop betraying his daughters' trust and tell them the truth. He is worried that the truth will hurt and hopes that distracting them with a road trip and amusement park visit, maybe even cheering himself up in the process a little and bonding with them; essentially offering them a “spoonful of sugar” will make the “medicine go down” easier. Whether we found the road trip a sympathetic or manipulative choice, the fact is that at the end of the film, Cusack breaks this one silence. Particularly once his elder daughter begins to suspect his lies, he recognizes this kind of silence as betrayal.

Second, the silence that Cusack's character does not break is about his views on the war. Ostensibly, we are led to believe that this is the thoughtful, sympathetic and responsible parental choice because he is protecting his daughters, - and even himself - from the dangers of doubt, the scary thought that their mother died in vain. This is supremely manipulative on the part of the filmmakers because it confronts most muddled thinkers with the idea that to share your views on the war inevitably means to hurt and confuse the innocent children losing parents and siblings in Iraq. It suggests that to speak up against the war is to blame the victims. It fails to accept that silence on this issue too is a betrayal.

Instead, the film manipulates audiences into thinking that the most we can do is cry for the children and cry for the dead soldiers and come together in acceptance of our loss and our shared passive fate at the hands of one hell of a war machine.

This is not the case in reality, nor is it the case in the film for the following reasons:

1) It is actually possible to protect young children from truths they are not ready to handle, while still maintaining those truths as an adult and speaking up about them among adults.

However in this film, when Cusack's adult character has the chance to speak with his brother, Alessandro Nivola's adult character, because the filmmakers make the two of them embody the dueling politics of left and right, they are unable to have a conversation.

Actually, the brothers' interaction goes beyond not having a conversation. Mike Ryan is absolutely correct in his description of Nivola's character as the Right's negative stereotype of the Left. And Cusack's character's conservative might prevails over Nivola twice.

First, Cusack mutes Nivola's educated, liberal views at dinner with his daughters, silencing and shaming Nivola for potentially damaging their innocent ears. Second, Cusack violently throws Nivola up against the wall to forcibly shut him up before he abruptly takes his daughters and leaves, never to reconcile with Nivola in this film again. Righteousness then appears to be on Cusack's side (regardless of the fact that he's betraying his daughters' trust by not telling them the truth about their mother) until the end of the film.

Had the filmmakers actually held liberal - rather than conservative - views that they wished to convey in a more subtle and dramatic (rather than 'didactic' way as one comment above put it) within the context of this story, then all they needed to do was have another scene between Cusack and Nivola in which the brothers had a conversation and reconciled.

After all, as the late great Martin Luther King Jr. said in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, "conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides." And who better to have a trustful give and take than a pair of brothers.

Instead, what wishful liberal audience members of "Grace is Gone" tend to do, as the filmmakers wish to manipulate them into doing, is project onto Cusack's character the idea that because he has a hard time conveying the truth to his daughters about their mother's death, he must be having a hard time believing in the necessity of the war. Yet at no point in the film does he convey doubt about the necessity of the war. Were he to re-visit his brother and question his conflict with his brother's views and try to understand his brother's perspective, then we might believe that Cusack's character could become anti-war...in the sequel.

2) It is not the case that both daughters are too young to know what is going on in the world. The older daughter is eleven or twelve years old. She has to write a school report about her mother and presumably, therefore, the war. Yet every time she turns on the television news to understand the war, her father, Cusack, turns it off.

That is a big statement. Whether or not you agree with the idea that once a child is old enough to ask the right questions and wants to know the truth, parents have a responsibility to share it (which is certainly true in the film on the question of the girls' mother's death), you must agree that by having Cusack's character continually shut off the news the filmmakers are making a choice not to speak and not to deal with the politics of war, and in fact, their silence is a major betrayal.

Certainly if young girls can grieve about the death of their mother, then they can grieve about the death of Iraqis and Iraqi mothers! If children are allowed to understand the war in the language of loss and grief then they need not only feel loss and grief for one side, they can feel it for both. And that is where the major moral ambiguity of this film lies.

What about Iraqi losses? Surely Iraqi life is as valuable as American life? Surely Iraqi losses are being reported on the news. But American dad, parochial, near blind (he got kicked out of the military for eye-sight problems) John Cusack does not want his daughters - and by extension the filmmakers do not want the American public - to worry their pretty, little heads about those other people over there on the other side of the world.

Focus on American losses and American healing this film admonishes. Do not think about the Iraqis we are killing. How dare you confuse petty politics with serious life and death matters, this film demands. The filmmakers of "Grace is Gone" whether well-intentioned or not, are as blind, as manipulative and as conservative in their views portrayed in this film as the current administration is in its views on the war in Iraq.

As the reviews in the trades and other reviews on this blog have suggested, the storytelling and aesthetics of "Grace is Gone" are mediocre at best, but that is no excuse. As Mike Ryan has said, with "Grace is Gone" the filmmakers are doing more harm than good: they are perpetuating and making emotionally resonant America's own myths about why the war is justified and need not end.
# posted by Anonymous @ 1/26/2007 11:48 AM  

 
It's great to have a comment from someone who actually saw the movie and Q and A.
I actually thought 911 was incredible and served a purpose . . . exposing the lies of the Bush Administration on a populist level. There isn't always "two-sides' to evil . . .(Too bad for others that Hitler killed himself and we didn't get to hear more of his POV).
# posted by Anonymous @ 1/26/2007 1:57 PM  

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