SAVING GRACE A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2000 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
Grace's life has gone to pot so she has turned to pot as the solution to her troubles -- not the smoking of it but its extremely lucrative cultivation. In Nigel Cole's comedy, SAVING GRACE, Grace is dramatically underplayed by two-time Academy Award nominee Brenda Blethyn (SECRETS AND LIES and LITTLE VOICE).
And therein lies the problem with the British comedy SAVING GRACE; it is so low-key as to be almost no-key whatsoever. The situations in it are sometimes cute but never funny enough to provoke actual laughter. Think of it as WAKING NED DEVINE run at slow speed. There is even a brief scene of a scrawny old man seen running around completely nude, much like the naked, octogenarian biker in WAKING NED DEVINE. Frankly, one of those is enough. I've seen it; I don't want to see it again.
As the story opens, the inhabitants of the small town where Grace lives have begun to do her favors. They will not accept her money because they know that her dead husband has left her heavily in debt, something that she is the last to learn. She even discovers that the family has a Swiss bank account, albeit an empty one.
As the bank is about to repossess her large estate, Grace, an accomplished orchid grower, hits upon a scheme to raise the 300,000 pounds she needs to pay off the lien against her property. With the help of her gardener, Matthew (Craig Ferguson), she turns her gardening skills to the growing of marijuana plants -- lots of them, enough for 20 kilos in their first harvest.
The movie's best scene occurs when Grace and Matthew turn on the massive lights that they use to boost production in her greenhouse. Lighting up the night sky like the aurora borealis, their nightly light show becomes as popular as fireworks on the Fourth of July. On the first occasion of the lighting, the movie plays "Spirit In The Sky" loudly. It is a moment worth a nice smile, even if no laughs.
The moments that produced the most laughter in our audience were when the characters got giddily stoned with their weed. As they laughed uncontrollably on the screen, it became somewhat infectious.
Although it might seem that writers Mark Crowdy and Craig Ferguson were painting themselves into a corner, they managed to come up with an imaginative ending. Even so, I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy. I prefer comedies that are funny. And I like to laugh every now and then. SAVING GRACE wasn't able to fill those simple requirements.
SAVING GRACE runs 1:34. It is rated R for drug content and language and would be acceptable for older teenagers.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
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