John Cusack was so intrigued by the story told in Grace is Gone that he not only signed on to star in the film but also served as a producer. Cusack plays Stanley, a father raising two young daughters who learns that his wife has died while serving in Iraq, in the dramatic film from writer/director James Strouse. His wife's death sends Stanley into shock, leaving him incapable of delivering the news to 12-year-old Heidi (Shelan O’Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk). Delaying the inevitable, Stanley pulls the girls from school and takes off on a trip to an amusement park in order to let them have some fun before he has to tell them the heartbreaking truth.
Asked for specific on what drew him to Grace is Gone, Cusack said there was just something about the story that captured his imagination. “I thought that I had a sense of the character. I thought it was in that gray zone where he was cowardly and heroic and I thought it felt like, ‘Wow, this would be a great thing to do right now, to just do the first three days of grief.’ The impetus to do it came out of outrage, but then I hoped that we would transcend the outrage and my own personal opinions and get to something more transcendent. I thought if we can do that, that’s really going to be interesting.”
Cusack met with a husband who’d lost his wive and found that experience, as expected, both touching and sad. “I met somebody who was in the exact position Stanley was in except he had three daughters, not two. He’d gotten that knock and his life was changed forever from a knock.”
Cusack used a lot of what he learned from speaking to the bereaved husband to help him figure out Stanley. “Mostly getting the music of it or the tone of it and just asking physical questions which are consistent with what you know about grief, which is you don’t have any equilibrium,” explained Cusack. “There’s something happening to you and it has its own time clock, and it doesn’t really matter what you do. It’s going to have its own life and you’re just the last person on earth who’s in control of it.”
The actor describes his character as ‘wound pretty tight’ in the beginning of the film and in fact Cusack’s barely recognizable. As the movie goes on, the tension’s released which leads to a softening of his appearance. Still, Cusack had no problem shedding this character at the end of the day. “No. By the end of the day when I take my makeup off, I may need a little bit of a chiropractor because I was so hunched over, but besides that I was okay.”
Physically distancing himself from Grace is Gone was a lot easier than separating from it on an intellectual basis. The story resonates with current events and Cusack believes doing a movie about grief is a way to connect with what’s happening right now. “The climate of the United States seems to me to be about denying pain or putting pain off on a macro and a micro level. I would never suggest for a moment that the military families are part of that equation. But, you know, when you’re in Hollywood or Chicago or New York or wherever you are, people are getting on with their lives and the war is this abstraction that they see on television. There’s a lot of pundits doing their usual partisan bickering where they are putting each other in boxes and calling each other names and talking down to each other. I think the whole thing has been fought on a credit card.”
“When I wanted to do the movie, they had banned photos of the flag draped coffins of the dead coming home. They said, ‘We control that, too.’ So in case we haven’t controlled enough, you don’t even get to see the soldiers who are paying the ultimate price for this. And they have all their reasons and they’re all bulls--t. It’s just a cowardly political act. So in that climate to make this movie, nobody wants to see grief. They can use it in their own photo ops and they can wax poetic behind it and, like all people, I’m sure they have very mixed motivations and a lot of them feel that what they’re doing is true and all of that. On another level, I think there’s a great denial of any sense of reality about this.”
Although his character's beliefs do not reflect his own political beliefs, Cusack fully embraced the character of Stanley and what he stands for. “I loved that [about] it because then I had to put my money where my mouth is in a sense where I had to really not judge or look down on that character but try to really get inside his shoes, and really try to understand his point of view and limits. It was great because it made me… I had much more compassion towards people who ideologically I disagree with.”
Working on Grace is Gone did not make Cusack change any of his opinions, however he now approaches the topic with much more compassion. “I mean because I have compassion for the Stanleys of the worlds doesn’t mean I would support an ultra authoritarian administration that wants to open up new markets using the U.S. military and Blackwater,” said Cusack, clarifying his stance. “I mean, that ain’t gonna happen ever but you can be pro-military and anti-war and anti-war profiteering. I hope that in 2007 you don’t want to have to say that but, I guess, given the state we’re in, I guess you do.”
There's little doubt that outside of America Grace is Gone will be marketed as an anti-war movie, something which Cusack's quite pleased about. Asked about the marketing campaign in America, Cusack said, “They’ll probably try to hedge their bet, but the movie is what it is. But I think what’s different about it is it doesn’t get lost in the usual…because in America everything gets into that polemic and that partisan stuff. They just want to put you in a box and it’s like a gang war. ‘Now you’re with us.’ ‘No, now you’re with us.’ And they send hits on the other guys and everybody has attack dogs. There’s no kind of intellectual honesty to it anyway. But art is supposed to do something else, isn’t it? It’s supposed to transcend. That’s what we tried to do. Whether we did it, I don’t know, but that’s what we tried to do. I don’t know how you can be pro-human and not anti-war. That’s the only dialectic it seems to me.”
