In his review of Brian De Palma's Redacted, The New York Times's A.O. Scott took stock of this year's current spate of Iraq-war themed films — Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, and Redacted among them — and noted that when contemplating them, he finds himself "drawn, in each case, to more or less the same conclusion. I am glad the movie was made, and I wish it were better." Grace Is Gone, directed by James C. Strouse from his own script and starring John Cusack in one of his finest performances, playing a husband and father who can't quite bring himself to inform his young daughters that their soldier mother has been killed in Iraq, is, in large part, as good a movie as it can be. Which is why it would be a bit of a shame if it got lost in the seeming shuffle of Iraq-based films, which for the most part have failed to make overwhelmingly positive impressions on either the majority of critics or the moviegoing public.

In a way, the Iraq war is only peripheral to this film's story, which is at heart a small-scale gender-reversed character study of a bereaved spouse's grief — a story made possible by the real U.S. military's recently revised policy concerning women in the army. Cusack plays Stanley Phillips, a patriotic working-class guy who'd be over in Iraq if he could, only he got bounced out of the army on account of the bad eyesight he was briefly successful at hiding. Now his wife, who he met in training, is over there, and he's managing a Home Depot–type store and tending to their two growing daughters, the eldest of whom, 13-year-old Heidi (very beautifully played by O'Keefe), is beginning to take an interest in current events, making Stanley quite uncomfortable. No sooner does he try to address this discomfort than news arrives of his wife's death. Inconsolably shattered and completely flummoxed as to how to tell his daughters, he impulsively agrees to drive them down to Florida for a trip to a much-dreamed of amusement resort (clearly Disneyworld was the idea, but that destination, for some reason, was not made available to the filmmakers). An en-route visit to Stanley's mother's house finds Stanley confronting his cynical, Bush-bashing brother (Nivola); sojourns in motels and shopping malls see Heidi growing more suspicious and rebellious while younger daughter Dawn (Bednarczyck) battles a restiveness she can't understand. All the while Stanley keeps calling his home answering machine, listening to its outgoing message from wife Grace, and confessing to her how much he misses her and how clueless he is about what to do.

Strouse's script is almost even-handed to a fault in its politics — Nivola's anti-war character is largely unappealing, and Cusack's character delivers a speech about trust in one's country's leaders that could have come out of a Capra picture. Indeed, if the real Cusack himself didn't wear his own politics on his sleeve, one would be hard-pressed to say exactly where the movie was coming from in this regard. (Then there's the fact that this movie's original score was replaced by effective, modal music composed by Clint Eastwood, not exactly a self-proclaimed liberal, who volunteered for the task after seeing the film and being moved by it.) Still, the movie is hardly likely to please the supporters of the Iraq war who regularly complain about Hollywood not being on board for the war effort, because this isn't a picture about "victory." Rather, it's a picture about tragedy in one American family's life, and it's a convincing and humane one.