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Friday, October 13, 2006
The characters never develop in 'Nearing Grace'
"Nearing Grace" is a coming-of-age movie in which nobody comes of age. Six months after his mother's funeral, Henry (Gregory Smith) drops out of high school. His brother, Blair (David Moscow), leaves home to become an LSD mystic, and father Shep (David Morse) grows long hair and a beard, listens to Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" and takes up motorcycle riding.
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View all photosHenry has a best friend, Merna (Ashley Johnson), with whom he has conversations that sound like high school psychology debates. They are in love, but he doesn't know it yet. Why? Because of Grace (Jordana Brewster), a bad little rich girl who listens to Nick Drake, Tommy James and the Velvet Underground.
Grace is a child of the '60s and so is the film. It is set in a 1979 in which there is no disco, no punk rock; just a lot of marijuana and free love. About the only thing that rings true about the 1979 setting is a brief shot of "The Hulk" on television.
The death of the mother is a framing device used to give weight to the existential meanderings of the three male characters. Since nothing is shown of her outside of a few photographs, the audience never feels her absence. All the audience is given to empathize with is Henry's lust for Grace. Her character is amoral, selfish and manipulative, but Brazilian beauty Brewster gives her a whirlpool sexuality that would drown a monk.
The rest of the cast is fine, although Morse gets perilously close to the eccentric self-indulgence that jeopardized Jeff Bridges' credibility in "The Door in the Floor."
The dialogue is full of fortune cookie aphorisms and stilted literary phrases that were never meant to be spoken aloud. When Shep lies in a hospital bed after driving his motorcycle through a window, Henry intones, with no real justification, "You abdicated your right to be my father." Later, Blair returns home and pitches a tent in the yard, telling his brother that he "figured the house would be too intense to sleep in."
Aside from Henry's realization that sexual desire and love are two different things, the characters in "Nearing Grace" are the same at the end of their story as they were in the beginning.
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