Gracie tries to inspire us not to be limited by the past, through soccer. Gracie is a beautifully shot movie, packed with only slightly veiled metaphors and full of clichés that don’t resonate emotionally or develop into a film worth seeing.
After a death in the family, Grace Bowen takes it upon herself to find redemption for the soccer team her loved one played on. She asks her father to train her, he refuses because she’s a girl and isn’t “Tough Enough.” Her mother tells her that she should just “take a bite of a shit sandwich.” Her brothers mock and ridicule her. Detoured by her family’s emotional slap down, Grace turns to a life of mischief, falling grades and boys. After coming to the self realization that her life will go nowhere if she continues on this path, she returns to her goal as a varsity soccer player.
Gracie is beautifully shot. Chris Manly, the cinematographer, has an understanding of light and composition that is obvious during the entire film. The rain is beautifully drippy. The dark scenes don’t lose the characters because of lack of light; they are still crisp and clean. I kept returning to how beautiful the movie was when I was too bored to pay attention to the characters in the movie.
Gracie is not beautifully acted. Carly Schroeder, who plays Grace, is awkward and unnatural in her skin. She can emote effectively, but the movie is nearly entirely difficult scenes and Schroeder can’t seem to hit the proper emotional cord. Watching Schroeder attempt adolescent anger reminds me of listening to a third grade school band attempt to play The Nutcracker Suite. You can generally grasp which song they are trying to play, but the execution leaves you wanting industrial strength ear plugs.
The supporting cast is equally lackluster. The usually spot-on Dermot Mulroney‘s portrayal of a lost father, has succumbed to grief and stuck in dated thought, lacks any stabbing or penetrating quality to make the performance enter your psyche. Grace’s love interest, Kyle, played by Christopher Shand, would be more believable if he were made of ketchup. He can’t convincingly be sincere, aggressive or affectionate. Shand looks too old to be in high school.
The only character that I felt any emotional sincerity from was Elizabeth Shue as Grace’s mother. Sure, there is one ridiculously written super-speech that is meant to bring tears to our eyes and falls flat, but it doesn’t ruin her overall performance. She does seem to be emotionally aware that her character is deeply in love with her children and husband. Lindsey Bowen, Shue’s character, has the widest range of emotion and depth. Shue performs beautifully as a mother who settled for a life well below her dreams. Shue was not the cause of the movie’s scab picking quality.
A great deal of the problem with the acting lays at the writers’, Chris Frisina, Karen Janszen and Lisa Petersen’s, feet. This movie is bulging with half baked lines heard in every B rated movie for the last ten years. The writers even pepper in a few worn out visuals that make the movie uninteresting to watch, even though it is beautifully shot. My favorites sounded like they were taken out of the mouth of Vince McMahon and Stone Cold Steve Austin in a WWE pre-match psyche-out banter; “You’re not tough enough.” “I am tough enough.” Then there was the typical, pre-equal opportunity; “A girl?” Nearly all the important dialogue could have been taken from any book or movie. The themes of the movie make me reminisce about every story in every story telling medium to which I’ve been exposed.
Gracie tries to be a movie with heart, but as with so many things, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Gracie is a shameful example of acting and writing. It would be in everyone’s best interest if this movie flopped in the theater as quickly as possible. We don’t want movies like this to influence the cinematic sphere at all.
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