No CGI, no space travel, no aquatic cross-species kissy-face, nothing blowing up, no steroided super-heroes.
Just good, old-fashioned love, suffering and redemption in a neat two-hour package. The ancient Greeks in their own stories pushed the notion that through suffering, we learn. And it’s just as applicable today. This fine new film called Getting Grace gives us ample opportunity to experience this suffering, but rewards us with lessons learned and redemption achieved. One could do much worse.
That, my friends, is the essential core of this gentle, heartwarming film. Daniel Roebuck (Lost, The Fugitive, Matlock) plays the role of Bill, a mortician whose life is upended by Grace, played by newcomer Madelyn Dundon, a 16-year-old terminally ill cancer patient who visits his funeral home to find out what will happen to her when she dies. As Bill teaches Grace about death, she teaches him lessons about life. Bill's sister Mary, played by Diane Wagner, operates the family funeral home with him. Others include Grace’s mother Venus, played by Marsha Dietlein Bennett, a local author Ron, played by Dana Ashbrook, and Rev. Osburn played by Duane Whitaker. There are various kids in the cancer ward, but especially sweet and charming Audrey as played by Alexa McFillin, along with various doctors and hospital administrators, other parents watching their children die.
It may not seem like a winning combination for a feel-good movie, what with being set mostly in places of dying and death, but with the honesty and poise and take-no-prisoners attitude projected by the marvelous young performer, Madelyn Dundon, as the title character (think Saoirse Ronan in Ladybird, now bald in the oncology unit), it really does touch both our head and our heart. And occasionally our funny bone too. Daniel Roebuck as director, co-writer and star is no slouch, either, as we watch a man being transformed from an distant, icy, cadaver-like mortician to a man who still can laugh and cry like a human being and not a mere waxen effigy.
And we're going to be laughing and crying along with him in this movie. All that melting of his heart and ours is due to Grace, if not grace.
I’ve always been a little suspicious of parents who name their baby girls with names like Hope, Charity, Chastity, Prudence, Peace, Joy, Patience, Harmony, Serenity and such. There’s just too much sweaty desperation in those allegorical labels. And there are no equivalent boy names like Justice, Strength, Courage, Humility. We're not in the Middle Ages where we had names from Pilgrim’s Progress like, well, Pilgrim, Christian or Obstinate. And don’t get me started on residual counter-culture names like Fern, Sage, Rue, Rain, Birch, North, Dusk, Sequoia, River, Cayenne, Saffron or Prairie. Good God, people, it’s a baby, not an ecosystem. OK, OK, my own son is named Adam, with all those resonant meanings, but if I had to do it over again, I’d call him Kayak.
But back to Getting Grace. It’s a polite, endearing, unassuming, nonthreatening movie. Something perfect for our perilous, quarrelsome times. Lean into and enjoy it.
Through her distinctive personality, her unwillingness to go without fighting, her hard-headed insistence that life is to be savored, the others learn their lessons. That becomes, if you will, Grace’s legacy, whether it’s a gift from God, or more simply, a gift from Grace herself. I suspect that even God could learn some things from her.
Now, some of you may be put off by the central role that hospitals and chemo and funeral homes play in this movie. But get over your squeamishness with the perfect storm of kids, cancer and caskets.
For those of us who lived with grandparents back in the day when bodies were laid out for visitation at home, and services at churches or funeral homes were often accompanied by dinner-on-the-grounds, this is no big thing. The funeral home circuit was a regular Sunday activity when you are raised by 60-somethings, as I was. Once upon a time, Memorial Day was called Decoration Day, where families gathered at cemeteries to sweep the gravesite, wash the stones, decorate with flowers, then join in a festive lunch on broad tables right there in the cemetery proper. Careful, Benny, no stepping on the graves, see this is your great-grandfather here, and here's the tombstone of your Uncle Joe. Yeah, he was a barber and that's why Aunt Irene chose a stone with a pair of barber scissors engraved into the granite. Here, have some more fried chicken. In other words, no big deal.
Likewise here, no big deal. Grace humorously hijacks an ironically named “Coping with Life” class, offered by her hospital for children dealing with their own fatal diseases, and moves it to the funeral home. So the funeral home, normally seen as a place of death, has redeemed itself into a place of life, all through Grace. Not only does she do her best to push the adults in her life to live that life to the fullest, she has the same effect on her peers. And she discovers love, herself.
This interplay of adults being taught by the child is a fascinating piece of this lovely film.
Filmed in beautiful fall colors in Leigh Valley PA, with a lively score, alternatively jocular and somber, the film is filled with charm and appeal that satisfies like so many of the overwhelming blockbusters do not. It stays on the human level with all those complexities of the heart and soul that require the intervention of uncommon grace in order to survive.
Ben Wiley is a retired professor of film and literature at St. Petersburg College. He also was on staff in the Study Abroad Office at University of South Florida as statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are in film, books, theatre, travel, literacy programs, kayaking Florida rivers. Contact him here.
This article appears in Mar 15-22, 2018.