Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. In this month's installment of the Screening Room, Mark looks at "Grace is Gone."

GRACE IS GONE (2007)

John Cusack is a bit of a local hero. He should be. He's from Chicago. Even though Chicago is still Chicago, and FIB's live there, drive up here, buy condos downtown, take up space in Door County, don't have the faintest idea how to negotiate the Marquette Interchange and worship the Cubbies, I think we should let up on them a little bit.

It's still the Midwest, and Cusack is loyal to that, at least. And, he is much more working class than most of the guys out there in Hollyweird.

Cusack made a film a couple of years ago called "Grace Is Gone." It was supposed to open the Milwaukee Film Festival in 2007, but the producers pulled it at the last minute. It was replaced by "Son of Rambow" -- a superior film in many ways, but perhaps not as popular, or successful, as the Cusack film would have been in the opening night slot. That's one of those questions we'll never be able to answer (like what would have happened to the economy if we had not invaded Iraq and spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to maintain a good face in a quagmire of a situation and alienated much of the world as we did. Only it's a much less important question).

Cusack is the producer and the star of "Grace Is Gone." And it's easy to see why an actor like Cusack would chose to get behind this film. He plays a normal, working-class father in Chicago -- a former marine who was discharged because of his eyesight. His wife is also in the military and has been deployed to Iraq. He is at home taking care of their two daughters, being the only male in support-group meetings dominated by the wives of service men, and working his crummy job as a manager of a Home Depot-type store. One morning before work, after the kids are off to school, two men in uniform show up at the door. The long take on Cusack's face when he opens the door is all we need to get the news.

Because he has no notion of how to tell his daughters that their mother has been killed in action, let alone how to accept the news himself, he takes the girls on a road trip to a place called Enchanted Gardens, a low-key Disney World-type place within driving distance of the ocean.

This is perhaps not a rational choice, but his devastation is so great that he is not in the category of rational people at that time. On the way, they stop by his hometown and visit with his brother, who, at 31, is taking a hiatus from college while he decides whether to pursue law or medicine.

The complicated and sometimes contradictory feelings of how to support the soldiers who fight, die and/or are wounded in that war, while still opposing the war itself and the reasons for being there, without having "unpatriotic" thrown in your face are handled pretty well in a scene around the breakfast table with the two girls listening, mystified.

By the time they reach the sea, he has exorcised his demons, celebrated his daughters, and watched his oldest, at age 13, realize that she is becoming a young woman, and he is able to share with them the death of their mother and they are all, hopefully, ready to face the future. As the director says in the special features, when a man or woman dies in battle, the lives of many, even generations into the future, are affected.

Cusack is doing a lot of work here. Even his walk is labored. His shoulders are slumped. He is a man whose dreams have been crushed even before he hears that his wife has been killed. It is a decidedly plain performance. Like the character he plays, he does not seek the camera; he seeks only solace from the utter loneliness and sudden burden of responsibility that has been thrust upon him.

The problem is that Cusack is working too hard at this. His character is a man who has no time to exercise, a man who is beaten down by the power of the storm he has taken on through circumstances beyond his control. Yet Cusack is obviously bulked up and in great shape. His personal trainer even has a credit on the film. Watching Cusack play this is a bit like watching the actor in a high school production play an 80-year-old man complete with the clichéd shuffling walk, stooped shoulders, gray hair out of a can, even a mustache and the creaky voice, and play him well but without ever convincing you that he is really that man.

Cusack is always the actor, or as William Butler Yeats would have it, he is always the dancer, never the dance.

The director doesn't help. He also wrote the script and it is well conceived and, for the most part, well written. But, as he admits in the special features, he has not directed before and had nothing to show Cusack to convince him that he should direct this film. It shows in the extremely workmanlike, plain production values. I wrote, in another venue, of "Gran Torino," Clint Eastwood's latest film, and his workmanlike style of directing where there is nothing extra, no attention grabbing flourishes, no stylish camera moves, just good plain, brick-layer-like movie making. I admire it and I think it works beautifully in Eastwood's best films.

Here, however, James Strouse, the director, has not earned the right to be so plain and simple. He does not bring the gravitas of a lifetime telling stories that Eastwood has and so his choices are not nearly so deeply considered. If you make this comparison, you learn that there is so much more to being plain and simple than just doing nothing.

Every decision a director makes, even if it is to just put the camera down in front of the actors and let them work, is a choice and the accumulation of those choices are what determine the kind of artist you may be as a director. Strouse does not serve Cusack well. And it feels as though Cusack was just tossing this one off and not really making the full on commitment that is necessary every time out, but especially when telling a story such as this.