Movies – Grace is Gone (spoiler warning)

Tuesdays is half-price day at Sterkinekor, which mean Tuesday is movie day. Last night we went to see Grace is Gone, I found a whole number of people in the theatre who I know, guess great minds think alike, cause this was the first half price day it was showing.

The movie consists of mainly dialogue, showing the road trip that a dad take his two daugthers on as he tries to get away from the reality that his wife has been killed in the war in Iraq, and tries to hide this from his daughters, because he doesn’t know how to talk about this to them.

This guy really isn’t a good father. He doesn’t let his kids have any own opinions, have rules so strict it really gets the kids down, and then make the absolutely horrible mistake of deciding not to tell the kids about the death of their own mother. The movie then portrays how this guy start doing all the right things in the midst of doing this absolute horrible thing.

While taking the girls on the trip he relax his rules a bit, although the reason is that he tries to hide what is going on from them. He actually start talking to his two daugthers, listening to them. Possibly the most beautiful part is where he buy two packets of sigarettes after cathcing the oldest smoking, and then start smoking a sigarette with her. Although he seems to be a trained smoker, he then start coughing even more than the kid, and in the end she is so worried about him, she actually forget about smoking. Or maybe the most beautiful part was where he got into the little toy house in the store with the smaller one and just started talking to her.

Does the name of the movie only talk about the wife, “Grace”, or does the movie also show relationships where “grace is gone”? I think the latter even more than the former. But then the movie also show relationships where grace has been found, it show that grace can be found in the midst of the most horrible places.

Is this possible? Can we actually do the right things for all the wrong reasons? I guess so. Maybe this is the grace given to parents, that sometimes in the midst of making the worst mistakes you can think of, although maybe with the best intentions, you do the most right things. Sometimes we just need to sit down with kids, just listen to them, and that might be more important than all the fancy tricks about how to raise kids, what to do, what not to do, and doing everything right.

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