By Fred Topel | Image property of The Weinstein Company.
Grace is Gone
Grace is Gone is a human story about the war in Iraq. John Cusack plays a man who has to tell his daughters that their mom was killed. People of any political party can feel for that situation, but Cusack in real life is quite outspoken.
John Cusack Talks the Politics of Grace is Gone
"The climate of the United States seems to me to be about denying pain or putting pain off on a macro and a micro level," said Cusack. "I would never suggest for a moment that the military families are part of that equation, but you know when you’re in Hollywood or Chicago or New York or wherever you are, people are getting on with their lives and the war is this abstraction that they see on television. There’s a lot of pundits doing their usual partisan bickering where they are putting each other in boxes and calling each other names and talking down to each other. I think the whole thing has been fought on a credit card. When I wanted to do the movie, they had banned photos of the flag draped coffins of the dead coming home. They said, 'We control that too. So in case we haven’t controlled enough, you don’t even get to see the soldiers who are paying the ultimate price for this.' They have all their reasons and they’re all bullsh*t. It’s just how cowardly a political act. So in that climate to make this movie, nobody wants to see grief. They can use it in their own photo ops and they can wax poetic behind it and like all people I’m sure they have very mixed motivations and a lot of them feel that what they’re doing is true and all of that. On another level, I think there’s a great denial of any sense of reality about this."
Emotional connection is not the only thing bothering Cusack about the war. "Probably the privatization of war and this movement to take what Eisenhower warned about [is most troubling]. The military industrial complex, we’ve gone far beyond that. It’s far more dangerous than that now. The very essence of security and disaster relief and prisons and war is now a for profit business. I think that has some sort of apocalyptic ramifications."
Cusack's character in the film supports his wife and the war. That was acting. " I loved that it because then I had to put my money where my mouth is in a sense where I had to really not judge or look down on that character but try to really get inside his shoes and really try to understand his point of view and limit. It was great because I had much more compassion towards people who ideologically I disagree with. It didn’t really change [my feelings] but I just approach the whole thing with much more compassion. I mean because I have compassion for the Stanleys of the worlds doesn’t mean I would support an ultra authoritarian administration that wants to open up new markets using the U.S. military and Blackwater. I mean that ain’t gonna happen ever but you can be pro-military and anti-war and anti-war profiteering. I hope that in 2007 you don’t want to have to say that but I guess given the state we’re in I guess you do."
The rest of the world may take Grace is Gone as an anti-war film, but Cusack expects American marketing to play it safe. "They’ll probably try to hedge their bet but the movie is what it is. I think what’s different about it is it doesn’t get lost in the usual, because in America everything gets into that polemic and that partisan stuff. They just want to put you in a box and it’s like a gang war. Now you’re with us. No, now you’re with us. And they send hits on the other guys and everybody has attack dogs and there’s no kind of intellectual honesty to it anyway. Art is supposed to do something else, isn’t it? It’s supposed to transcend. That’s what we tried to do. Whether we did it, I don’t know, but that’s what we tried to do. I don’t know how you can be pro-human and not anti-war. That’s the only dialectic it seems to me."
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