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Grace Is Gone is the very definition of a tear-jerker, opening with a melancholy look into the daily routine of Stanley (John Cusack), a man living a quiet and detached life as a manager of a retail store and raising his two daughters Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe) and Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) while his wife as away serving a tour with the Army in Iraq.  We watch him attend a support group in which he is the only male, unable to really bond with these women whose spouses are also away at war.

The next day he receives the tragic news that his wife has been killed in Iraq, and he basically shuts down.  When he comes out of it his children are getting home from school and he makes a snap decision to take them to an early supper.  At the restaurant he quickly changes his mind about that, dragging them back to the car.  He finally asks them where they want to go and Dawn enthusiastically responds “Enchanted Gardens!” an amusement park that they’d visited in the past, and Stanley agrees.

The drive is a long one, and along the way Stanley tries to get a rise out of Heidi by doing donuts in an empty field when he begins to find her dour mannerisms to be too much for him.  Stanley calls the house from the road, letting Grace know where they are, trying desperately to wrap his brain around the idea that she isn’t coming home.

Their route finds them in the neighborhood of Stanley’s mother, but when they visit she isn’t home.  They instead find Stanley’s brother John (Alessandro Nivola), a slacker type who doesn’t think too much of the war and derides Stanley for supporting it.  The girls go to get a bite to eat with their uncle, who reveals insight into Stanley’s frustration in life, as he and Grace met in the military, but Stanley was eventually discharged when it was discovered that he’d managed to cheat an eye exam to enlist in the first place.

Back at the house, John finds out that Grace is dead, and when he confronts Stanley about it, Stanley loses it a little and leaves with the girls, not yet prepared to tell them what’s going on.

They stop at a hotel, and Heidi calls home to her teacher, anxious because they’re missing school, and though nothing is said specifically, she begins to suspect that something is more amiss than she might’ve first thought.  Unable to sleep, she walks outside that evening in the wee hours of the morning and shares a cigarette with a boy she saw earlier at the pool.  Stanley finds her and is of course angry with her, dragging them from the hotel in the middle of the night to continue their journey, but as he drives and they talk, he realizes that Heidi has been experiencing insomnia from worrying about her mother, and he asks her to please wake him to talk if she can’t sleep, rather than wandering away in the night.

The journey continues as they drive to Florida to visit Enchanted Gardens, and Stanley learns as he goes how to possibly relate to his daughters better in a trail and error method, indulging their every whim to try to sugar coat the worst that has to inevitably come.

This film features a wonderful performance by Cusack as the grieving husband, and the child actors are great, even if they look absolutely nothing alike in their roles as sisters, they’re wonderfully real, never typically precocious and annoying as a great deal of child actors can be.

First time director James C. Strouse (working here from his own script) has crafted a heartfelt tale that is sweet without being cloying, and in spite of being a sad film still manages to give us a glimmer of the hope one can find even after such a tragedy.

Grace Is Gone arrives on a DVD that features A Conversation On Grace, which is a brief behind the scenes reel, a 7 minute segment on the inspiration for the film and a short profile of TAPS, which is a Tragedy Assistance Program that helps families deal with their loss.  An assortment of trailers round out the disc.

This film is quite sad, but the journey that Stanley and his children go on is a wonderfully heartfelt ride as they come to grips with their loss, I’d highly recommend this one.

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