Word: graceful
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...Grace Brewer she is brittle, crazed with grief and absolutely unable to cope, unlike her math professor husband Allen (Pierce Brosnan), who would like her to at least allow the maid to pick their son's dirty socks up off the floor. (Writer/director Shana Feste has made the Brewers rich, and you can almost hear her pitch to the studio, filled with longing for the profound: "See, they had everything, but now, without Bennett, nothing.") All the Sarandon grief moves are there: the defiant head lift, the wide, wet eyes, the clenched fists, the accusations hurled at Allen...
...helped by Feste's screenplay, which presents Grace as someone irrationally fixated on the minutiae of Bennett's death. Seventeen minutes elapsed between the moment Bennett's Karmann Ghia got T-boned by a pick-up truck at an intersection and his time of death. Grace wants desperately to know about those 17 minutes - but not about the hours her son spent immediately before the accident, having the greatest night of his life consummating a love for longtime high-school crush Rose (Carey Mulligan) - a girl to whom he had never dared speak until that last...
...While Rose's belly expands, Grace camps out at the bedside of Jordan (Michael Shannon), the comatose driver of the pick-up, an apparent low-life with warrants out for his arrest. She reads to him, fusses over him and orders his nurses around. When conscious, Shannon is so consistently lively and interesting (see Bug and Revolutionary Road) that we too hope he wakes up, if only to tell Grace she's lost her mind. She refuses to feel any pleasure over the impending arrival of her grandchild. "I don't want everybody thinking we're blessed," she hisses...
Undeniably, grieving people do crazy, melodramatic things. But Sarandon here is unfairly saddled with unsympathetic actions; indeed, she's turned into what amounts to the villain of the piece. Grace is mean to Rose, oblivious to her other son, the pill-popping Ryan (Johnny Simmons from Hotel for Dogs) and cold and cutting to Allen. But unlike the mother figure played by Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, Grace isn't really cold. We know she'll come around eventually - this isn't a movie with tricks up its sleeve - and the wait grows tedious. (See pictures of movie costumes...
...some advice: take a torch. Lying at the end of a murky corridor in a building in General Santos, a city in the southern Philippines plagued by power shortages, the two-room office is cramped, sweltering and lit by a single candle. And the emergency generator? "Broken," admits Grace, a staff member, fanning herself with an envelope...