Getting Grace

Very early on in Getting Grace, there's a glimpse of a man in a suit sweeping the walk in front of a funeral home. The shot lasts about four seconds. That's enough time for the actor to register and, when he re-enters the story about five minutes later, you put it together. This is Daniel Roebuck who, in addition to co-starring in the film, happens to be the writer-director. But you remember him from something else.

Roebuck was John "Samson" Tollet, the teenage murderer in Tim Hunter's deeply disturbing 1986 film about teen alienation River's Edge. In the years since that remarkable study of despair, he has enjoyed a fruitful career as a character actor, largely in TV shows (Lost, Glee, The Man in the High Castle). Looking over his filmography, you realize you must have seen him dozens of times over the years, but somehow never made the connection.

It's too much to say that Roebuck's role in River's Edge informs his work here -- it's difficult to imagine two movies as different as Getting Grace and River's Edge, although you could argue that both are in some ways about the death of a teenager. But it does color the way you perceive Getting Grace; you can't quite separate Roebuck's present performance from the one he delivered more than 30 years before. Samson haunts the character he plays here, a good-hearted if socially stunted mortician named Bill Jankowski.

Bill is not of the class of morticians that his sister and partner in the funeral home Mary (Diane Wagner) calls "huggers" -- he can deal with the dead but has issues with the quick. So when a very much alive but dying-of-cancer 16-year-old named Grace (the promising Madelyn Dundon, picking up her first film credit) enters his life, ostensibly to learn what's going to happen to her when "it's her turn," it throws him. It probably doesn't help that Grace is borderline obnoxious, given to dropping into dramatic accents and violating Bill's personal space.

Having recently flung her cheap-looking wig out the window of her mother Venus' (Marsha Dietlein) Volvo to mark her refusal to go on pretending that a miracle is imminent, precocious Grace is determined to embrace death. And she's not willing to allow others to euphemize or retreat behind soft-focus homilies. There's a bit of understandable aggression in the way she turns interactions with the well-meaning into confrontations.

"Have you ever seen a miracle?" she asks the Rev. Osburn (played by Duane Whitaker, who played ill-fated pawn shop owner Maynard in Pulp Fiction), an Episcopalian who serves as the chaplain in the hospital where she's being treated. When the poor man admits he hasn't, Grace decides she likes his honesty.

We gradually come to understand there's a purpose beyond morbid curiosity to Grace's encounters with Bill, the chaplain and Ron, a New Age-y author of a popular book about the afterlife played by Dana Ashbrook, another actor who has a cult following thanks to roles in both of David Lynch's Twin Peaks series and Dawson's Creek.

As you might have deduced from the title, Getting Grace fits into the general category of faith-based films in that it assumes the virtues of belief as given but isn't specific to any particular religious tradition. (If you met it at a cocktail party it might describe itself as "spiritual.") Even though Roebuck's Catholicism apparently runs deep, there's nothing doctrinaire about his gentle and ultimately moving movie.

That said, there are a few scenes -- especially early ones -- that feel abrupt, and the writing is not always up to the generally excellent performances. (Grace can be a little much, but maybe we shouldn't hold the character trying too hard against Dundon.) And while the cinematography is of professional quality, Roebuck makes exceptionally good use of real locations in and around his hometown of Bethlehem, Pa., which is surprisingly picturesque, at least to those of us who know it only as an old center of the steel industry.

On its face, Getting Grace is a cut above your average independent inspirational film because it doesn't default to sermonizing and kitsch; but for those of us who invest something in actors we've watched over decades it might be a different sort of movie altogether: So this is what became of Samson.

MovieStyle on 04/06/2018