GETTING GRACE REVIEWED
“Getting Grace” struck me odd. While it’s a religious movie, it’s also a film about a young woman trying to carve out an identity in the face of certain death. When the titular Grace arrives at the funeral home to understand death, she never expects the mortician to meet her interest. Various relatives and townspeople come together to try and make sense of this young girl’s morbid obsession. What is funny is that it seems to be spreading to the other kids in the cancer ward. A great deal of kiddie disease movies target fear, but this one avoids it.
While being targeted to Christian markets, there is a Zen current flowing underneath the film. Grace isn’t that fearful of her impending demise. She wants to take fear out of finality and bring people back into the places of death. She brings the Coping therapy classes to the funeral home and out of the sterility of the Hospital. Dying becomes just a part of living, as Grace wants to take back her dignity. Along the way, she tries to set up her mother with a man…so there’s still a healthy bit of cliche.
Given the time of year, these kinds of movies seem to flood the cinemas. I find it odd that only one Regal theater around me is showing the movie. For as ‘progressive’ as this area seems to be, there is always a market for religious movies. But, this isn’t a religious movie. It’s a movie about religion being used to answer the existential questions that youth never get answered. Also, it might just be me, but I found Grace’s death scene to be shot rather realistically.
That’s not something I see in a ton of these movies, but it caught me by surprise. Check it out during this Easter season. There’s enough here to entertain the entire family.
FILM STATS
- 1 hr and 52 minutes
- PG-13
- Hannover House
