by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie from the Lifetime backlog that proved to be
astonishingly good: Gracie’s Choice, a
2004 production directed by Peter Werner (whose name is also on the laundry
list of 11 “producers” even though I suspect he did the lion’s share of the
actual production work) from a script by Joyce Eliason based on a nonfiction story in the Reader’s Digest by Rena Dictor Le Blanc. Gracie Thompson (Kristen
Bell, an excellent actress cursed with a kewpie-doll face that was excellently
suited for this part but probably handicapped her for other roles) is the
eldest daughter of Rowena Lawson (Anne Heche, who after her spectacular breakup
with Ellen De Generes and the crazy memoir she wrote, in which she insisted
that aside from her fling with Ellen she’d been totally straight, which was
believable, and that she had hallucinated being abducted by space aliens,
seemed to get typecast in these sorts of demented roles). Rowena has had six
kids, three girls and three boys, but each had a different father because
Rowena has spent her life traveling around the country, living (or at least
partnering with) one sleazy boyfriend after another and doing a wide variety of
drugs. At the beginning she and her latest fuck de jour are cornered by police; they barely make it out and
the boyfriend gives her the kiss-off, telling her she’s on her own. She escapes
it that time and settles into another community, where she lasts long enough to
get the kids enrolled in school, but when mom’s latest male pickup decides to
try to rape Gracie, Gracie fights him off but sustains injuries that school
officials notice and have to report to the authorities.
Mom ends up in jail and
the kids end up in a youth facility, and when they’re finally released they’re
taken in by their grandmother, religious fanatic Louela Lawson (Diane Ladd) —
only it turns out that Louela can’t say no to her scapegrace daughter Rowena,
so Rowena moves in with them (a big no-no under the terms of their release
agreement) and Louela gives her the $520 per month in “caregiver money” she’s
getting from the county wherever this is taking place. (Like most Lifetime
movies, this was filmed in Canada and Canadian locations “played” U.S. ones,
but instead of being made in the usual centers of Canadian film production,
Vancouver and Montreal, this one was shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and “Nova
Scotia Film Industry Tax Credit” even got listed as one of the companies that
made it.) So Gracie determines to move the kids out of grandma’s house and literally
raise them herself, funding this with her job as a waitress (she calls herself
a “barista” but the establishment where she works looked more like a restaurant
than a coffeehouse to me) and keeping her five brothers and sisters in line
with a maniacal intensity. At high school she attracts a boyfriend, Tommy
(Shedrack Anderson III), product of a mixed-race relationship (which explains
his appearance — obviously of African descent but about Obama’s color) — it’s a
measure of some degree of racial
progress that she can be shown dating a Black guy and it isn’t a big deal in
the plot — and he encourages her to apply for a college scholarship so they can
be together and got to the same university, but she doesn’t want to because she
doesn’t think she’ll have the time to do college work and raise five children. Then Rowena, the poster-child
for parental irresponsibility, gets out of jail and wants to regain custody of
the kids — I got the impression that by this time Gracie’s sisters have aged
out of legal minority but the boys are still of the age where they legally need
some sort of parent or guardian —
and Gracie’s father, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two, turns up but only to ask her to sign a paper saying that he wasn’t the
father of Rowena’s other kids and therefore isn’t obligated to pay the back
child support Rowena is trying to get out of him. Gracie determines to go to
court to terminate her mom’s parental rights over her brothers and adopt them
herself, despite warnings from her pro bono attorney that this is going to be expensive
(apparently all the kids’ fathers
have to be contacted to see if they’re cool with losing their parental rights) and the breakup with Tommy it
precipitates, since he gives her a them-or-me ultimatum and makes it clear that
the only kids she wants to see Gracie raising are the ones he was hoping to
have with her.
The film’s climax is in family court, with Rowena attempting to
entice the kids back to her by promising them a fantasy life on a ranch in
Wyoming once she sells grandma’s house (Louela has died and, during the scene
of the funeral, the minister officiating at the service pronounces the “t” in
“often”) and the boys, having heard their mom’s fairy tales way too often,
decide they want their sister to raise them instead. The judge grants Gracie’s
adoption petition and gives them five minutes to select a new family name so
the rest of the world will realize they’re the biological relations they
actually are — and, looking at one of the names on the sign in the courtroom
lobby identifying the judges and court personnel, they pick “Weatherly” because
of everything they’ve “weathered” over the years. Gracie’s Choice is a marvelous film, profoundly moving precisely
because director Werner and writer Eliason tell the story simply and
straightforwardly, refusing to “milk” something that was already sufficiently
emotionally intense they didn’t need
to push the buttons and go for the obvious tear-jerking. While I didn’t care
for the brown-toned cinematography by Neil Roach — just why have dirty browns and greens become the default
tonality for film after film, especially any film aspiring to seriousness? — I
was gripped enough by the sensitivity of the direction, writing and acting (the
final scene in court, in which Anne Heche loses it after she realizes her
children have abandoned her, could have been an excuse for scenery-chewing but
Werner restrains her, making her
believable as a woman with a twisted sense of values but a sense of values
nonetheless) that I cried at the end, and at the same time I felt exalted by
Gracie’s incredible persistence and triumph over way more adversity than the average person her age
(especially one who isn’t living in absolutely dire poverty) ever has to deal
with. Gracie’s Choice, though
over 10 years old, is the sort of diamond in the rough that keeps me watching
Lifetime; I’d hoped it would be good but I hadn’t expected it to be this good!
