Saving Grace ***
Rated on a 4-star scale Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre) Released in the UK by Fox on May 19, 2000; certificate 15; 93 minutes; country of origin UK; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Nigel Cole; produced by Mark Crowdy. Written by Mark Crowdy, Craig Ferguson; from a story by Mark Crowdy. Photographed by John de Borman; edited by Alan Strachan.
CAST..... Brenda Blethyn..... Grace Trevethan Craig Ferguson..... Matthew Valerie Edmond..... Nicky Martin Clunes..... Doctor Bamford Tchéky Karyo..... Jacques Jamie Forman..... China MacFarlane
There have been a lot of small British movies opening in cinemas over the past two years, thanks to industry aid from National Lottery funding. Most of them have been made by bad filmmakers with insufficient budgets. And they've been comedies -- which is the hardest genre to get right, and the most embarrassing to fail at.
It was therefore with a sense of dread that I entered "Saving Grace", yet another quirky little Britcom. While it has not been paid for by the Lottery, its financier is Sky Pictures, the television company that ran an ad campaign not long ago to boast about getting exclusive rights to "What Rats Won't Do" and "Gargantua". Things did not look promising.
You can feel the "but" coming on, can't you? Well, as I said, things did not look promising... but "Saving Grace" is actually a sweet, good-natured little comedy with strong performances and humour that emerges naturally from a story taken seriously. Funny, how things turn out.
As the film opens, we see Grace Trevethan (Brenda Blethyn) in her Cornish mansion, preparing for the funeral of her husband. Soon she discovers that the late gent has left her with a killer mortgage and other assorted debts that total almost half a million pounds. As she has never worked, lives in a tiny village and is a middle-aged female, her options on how to raise the money are limited to say the least. What can she do?
The one thing Grace does have a knack for is gardening, and when times get so desperate that the bank is on the phone non-stop and debt collectors and surveyors are constantly knocking on the door, she decides to make a risky proposition to her doobie-smoking groundskeeper Matthew (Craig Ferguson): How about the two of them use hydroponics to rapidly grow a huge crop of marijuana, then sell it in London, and put an end to their money problems?
Word spreads about the plan; nobody has conversations about it, but everyone in town comes to know what Grace and Craig are up to, and when their greenhouse lights go on full blast every night, the men in the pub all put their sunglasses on and let out a supportive cheer. There's a cute conspiratorial attitude in the air -- my colleague Harvey Karten, in reviewing "Saving Grace", made an interesting and appropriate comparison to last year's "Waking Ned".
In a way, "Saving Grace" is better than that movie, because its characters aren't so artificially 'colourful'; they're ordinary people, reacting in amusing ways to a mischievous situation. Any moments with the potential to be dreadful gags are turned into wonderful comic set-pieces by the director, Nigel Cole, who makes sure everything serves the story, and knows that even the silliest humour must seem genuine to get laughs. One scene late on in his movie -- in which two old ladies mistake Grace's plants for tea, drink it, and then get the giggles and munchies at work -- is hash humour every bit as funny as anything Cheech and Chong ever gave us. Far out, madam.
COPYRIGHT(c) 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani Please visit, and encourage others to visit, the UK Critic's website at http://members.aol.com/ukcritic
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