Saving Grace
UK 1999
Reviewed by Edward Lawrenson
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Port Liac, Cornwall, the present. Amateur gardener Grace Trevethan discovers her deceased husband John ran up debts without her knowledge and had a mistress, China. She makes her gardener Matthew redundant, but this isn't enough to stop Quentin, a London-based businessman, from threatening to repossess her cottage. Grace suggests a business proposition to Matthew, a casual pot smoker: they will grow marijuana in her greenhouse and sell the harvest to drug dealers. Matthew agrees. Promising Matthew's pregnant partner Nicky she will keep Matthew out of trouble, Grace goes to London to sell the drugs. Her attempts to sell a sample on the street land her in jail. China bails her out and introduces Grace to drug-dealer Vince, who reluctantly takes her to French crime-boss Jacques, a potential buyer. Aware of a mutual attraction, Grace strikes a bargain with Jacques.
Jacques' thuggish associate follows Grace to Port Liac. As Grace harvests the marijuana, Quentin arrives to stake his claim on the house. Mistaking Jacques' henchman for a poacher, local policeman Alfred follows him to Grace's house and discovers her stockpile of weed. He advises her to destroy it before more police arrive. Grace burns the weed. Some time later, Grace is a successful novelist, married to Jacques.
Review
The best thing about Saving Grace is the trouble the film-makers went to in order to ensure the authenticity of Grace's marijuana plants. The producers actually secured permission to get hold of all this gear from the Ministry of Agriculture. While a film as casually pro-soft drugs as this isn't likely to earn a commendation from Home Secretary Jack Straw, it says something for Saving Grace's innocuous charm that the producers gained Crown dispensation in the first place. It's hard, for instance, to imagine Donald Cammell making a similar approach when he shot Performance (1970).
In fact, the comparison with Performance isn't too ludicrous. Saving Grace's final sequence - where the police, Jacques' henchmen and a couple of old dears from the Womens' Institute fall under the influence of Grace's dope, disrobe and run naked through her garden - does suggest a suburban spin on Performance's assault on established conventions. Except, like everything else in this film, this rather strained scene is less a moment of pure carnival, deliriously upturning codes of normality, than an innocent bit of fun. It's certainly no more shocking than when real-life WI members went nude and were photographed last year to shake up their organisation's rather stuffy reputation.
This benignly tolerant attitude envelops all of Saving Grace: not only does her local community blithely accept Grace's career in drugs, she ultimately escapes any charges, gets to keep her house and marries Jacques - a rosy outcome which would be next to heresy in the morally upright Ealingesque world director Nigel Cole consciously evokes. Even a brush with the criminal underworld has its endearingly ordinary, if not solidly respectable side. "Can I go now," small-time drugs-dealer Vince says, trying to wheedle his way out of a potentially dangerous situation, "I've got to pick my daughter up from flute practice."
All of which makes for a film with a certain baggy, unfocused amiability. But in trying too hard to convince us what good eggs his characters are, Cole creates a shapeless, dramatically unengaging movie. Grace and China's descent into the criminal underworld, for instance, is about as a tense as a stroll through Harvey Nichols, and the prolonged mistaken-identity finale is like a Ray Cooney farce with the timing out of whack. Cole would have done well to remember the best Ealing films were never this nice: think of the caustic bite of Whisky Galore! or the black humour of Charles Crichton's innumerable crime capers.
This said, Brenda Blethyn's performance as Grace - who blossoms into the Delia Smith of hemp cultivation - stands comparison with a line of such indomitable Ealing women as Margaret Rutherford and Katie Johnson. Dressed in Ascot attire circa 1977, her attempts to sell a sample of dope to the bewildered residents of London's Notting Hill (Performance's stomping ground) almost make up for the film's flabbier moments.
Credits
- Director
- Nigel Cole
- Producer
- Mark Crowdy
- Screenplay
- Craig Ferguson
- Mark Crowdy
- Story
- Mark Crowdy
- Director of Photography
- John de Borman
- Editor
- Alan Strachan
- Production Designer
- Eve Stewart
- Music
- Mark Russell
- ©Rich Pickings and British Sky Broadcasting
- Production Companies
- Twentieth Century Fox and Sky Pictures present in association with Portman Entertainment and Wave Pictures a Homerun production
- Executive Producers
- Cat Villiers
- Xavier Marchand
- Co-producers
- Craig Ferguson
- Torsten Leschly
- Line Producer
- Steve Clark-Hall
- Production Supervisors
- Leontine Ruette
- 2nd Unit:
- Mairi Bett
- Brian Donovan
- Production Co-ordinator
- Suzie Shearer
- Location Managers
- Cornwall:
- Johnny Bamford
- London:
- Matt Steinmann
- Post-production
- Supervisor:
- Mark Harris
- Co-ordinators:
- Katja Leschly
- Katura Jensen
- Rupert Hall
- Assistant Directors
- Mark Griffiths
- Russell Channon
- Peter Evans
- 2nd Unit:
- Russell Channon
- Lance Roehrig
- Tom Rye
- Script Supervisor
- Kim Armitage
- Casting
- Director:
- Gail Stevens
- Associate:
- Maureen Duff
- Script Consultant
- Katherine Butler
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- Sue Gibson
- Camera/Steadicam Operator
- Alistair Rae
- Digital Visual Effects
- The Film Factory
- Art Director
- Tom Read
- Costume Designer
- Annie Symons
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Marco Scotti
- Hair/Make-up Designer
- RoseAnn Samuel
- Make-up Artist
- Gill Rees
- 2nd Unit Make-up Designer
- Gill Rees
- 2nd Unit Make-up Artistes
- Claire Pritchard
- Shelley Manser-Cossey
- Main Title Design
- Simon Giles
- Additional Orchestrations
- Matt Dunkley
- Executive Music Producers
- Ray Williams
- Greg Rogers
- Mixer
- Gerry O'Riordan
- Soundtrack
- "Take a Picture" by Filter; "Make Me Smile" by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel; "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum; "Sunshine at Last" by Koot; "Human (Tin Tin Out Mix)" by Pretenders; "Witchcraft" by Robert Palmer; "Accidental Angel (Saving Grace)" by Sherena Dugani; "Wise Up" by A.F.T.; "Might As Well Go Home" by Plenty
- Sound Mixers
- John Midgley
- 2nd Unit:
- Stephen Phillips
- Re-recording Mixer
- Petter Fladeby
- Sound Editor
- Alan Paley
- Dialogue Editor
- Simon Price
- ADR
- Loop Group:
- Lyps Inc
- Mixer:
- Andrew Thompson
- Foley
- Artists:
- Pauline Griffiths
- Ruth Sullivan
- Mixer:
- John Bateman
- Cast
- Brenda Blethyn
- Grace Trevethan
- Craig Ferguson
- Matthew
- Martin Clunes
- Doctor Bamford
- Tchéky Karyo
- Jacques
- Jamie Foreman
- China McFarlane
- Bill Bailey
- Vince
- Valerie Edmond
- Nicky
- Tristan Sturrock
- Harvey Sloggit
- Clive Merrison
- Quentin
- Leslie Phillips
- vicar
- Diana Quick
- Honey
- Phyllida Law
- Margaret
- Linda Kerr Scott
- Diana
- Denise Coffey
- Mrs Hopkins
- Paul Brooke
- Charlie
- Ken Campbell
- Sergeant Alfred
- John Fortune
- Melvyn
- Philip Wright
- Nigel
- Darren Southworth
- Terry
- Magnus Lindgren
- Tony
- Dean Lennox Kelly
- Bob
- Johnny Bamford
- removal boss
- Bill Hallet
- postman
- Alison Dillon
- secretary
- Bill Weston
- John Trevethan
- Jonathan Kydd
- Mark Crowdy
- presenters
- Jay Benedict
- master of ceremonies
- Ben Cole
- man at checkout
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- 20th Century Fox (UK)
- 8,327 feet
- 92 minutes 32 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe
- Anamorphic