Sundance, day seven: Kids, real and imagined

Two of the movies I saw today have been polarizing Sundance audiences, and their respective treatment of child characters -- and childhood -- is a major reason why.

First off, "Grace is Gone," the John Cusack drama mentioned in an earlier post. He co-produced it, too, but it was written and directed by first-timer named James C. Strouse, and you can tell. Cusack plays Stanley Philips, a manager at a Home Depot-style store and dad to two girls, 12-year-old Heidi (Shelan O'Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn (Gracie Bdenarczyk). Mom is in Iraq serving a tour of duty, and Stanley, a former serviceman himself, is behind her decision and behind the war. Then the doorbell rings and he learns that -- well, check the title.

He can't bring himself to tell the girls; instead he throws them in the car in a panic of false cheer and heads for a Florida theme park. So "Grace is Gone" becomes that most worn of Sundance genres, the family road-trip movie. It travels a different geographical and emotional corner of same cinematic country as "Little Miss Sunshine".

Some people didn't buy into this storyline. One critic I know found the movie horribly manipulative -- he called it "emotional porn." But he doesn't have kids. The people I talked to who are parents (and count me in here) were floored. Strouse nails the relationship between the dad and the girls, between the girls themselves, and between Heidi and the world she's growing up into. Sure, it's manipulative -- all movies are. Get beyond the story hook, though, and the observations, the ways Strouse and his cast capture people unable to talk to those they love, are valid and fresh.

Newcomer O'Keefe is the real star of the movie: Heidi's a prim, watchful almost-teen aching to be daring, and the actress gets all of that with ease. Cusack is appealing but he can't quite convince you he's a middle-American schlub. Or maybe he just can't help being so adorably Cusackian. The movie will benefit commercially from his presence but probably would have benefited creatively from an unknown. And I say that as a lifelong Lloyd Dobler partisan.

Then there was "Joshua," which some people liked a lot but others (myself among them) found just plain bad. It's a NYC spooky-tale, sort of like the recent Nicole Kidman film "Birth" -- Yupper West Side couple Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga have just had a baby daughter, and 9-year-old son Joshua (Jacob Kogan) isn't taking it well. The boy dresses in coat and tie, is well-spoken, and, it turns out, both crafty and homicidal. "The Omen" crossed with "The Bad Seed," in other words.

The problem: Joshua, as written by David Gilbert and director George Ratliff, isn't remotely believable as an actual kid, even a kid in a glossy genre flick. Neither are his parents: they're gilded Manhattan dopes who miss all the signs their darling is plunging off the deep end. Why can't people in these movies pick up the phone and call a psychiatrist early on? Because then there'd be no suspense to cook up. Farmiga is actually very good as the increasingly stressed-out mom, and "Joshua" is at its best digging into the nasty side of early parenthood. But the title character is just a screenwriter's boogeyman in short pants.