HIGH TIMES
by Sasha Stone

Despite the attention SAVING GRACE is getting for its lead character's choice to grow and sell pot to save her house, the Nigel Cole film isn't so much about the war on drugs as it is about a fishing village in Cornwall and how deeply its townspeople care about each other. And, as we over-30 women like to say, if it has Tcheky Karyo in it, how bad can it be?

Brenda Blethyn takes on the title role of Grace, a widow who discovers, upon her husband's death, that she is so far in debt as to be on the verge of losing everything, but most especially her beloved 300 year-old home. Things are so bad for her that even the local charity refuses when she offers up a donation. But Grace is determined to survive this disaster, even if it means turning to a life of crime.

She is tempted into the dark side when her gardener Matthew (co-writer Craig Ferguson from "The Drew Carey Show") alerts her to his sick plants. "I'm a gardner, these plants are sick," he says simply. Grace, it turns out, is a natural gardener (a la Mrs. Miniver) as opposed to one who cuts grass for a living, as Matthew does.

Next thing you know, Grace and Matthew are growing the best bud this side of Humboldt, a hydroponic hybrid that will make Grace the money she needs to save her house and make Matthew rich. While the film is decidedly on the side of harmless doob-tokers everywhere, it also appears to be aware of sending "the wrong message." The law is ridiculous but it is still the law.

The only character who seems to be at all worried about the ethics involved is Matthew's girlfriend Nicky (Valerie Edmond), who provides the film with its common sense as well as its spiritual struggle, if you will. Obviously she can smoke weed with the best of 'em but she doesn't want to see the future father of her child incarcerated and being chased by a prisoner "with a stiffy." Nicky is the one who ends up sitting in church pondering what's right and wrong about what Grace and Matthew are doing. "If you have to commit a crime to get what you want," the priest says, "perhaps you weren't meant to have it."

Without the albatross of the "pot story," Saving Grace might have been a charming love story with quaint townspeople along the lines of Four Weddings and a Funeral, or Local Hero, or even The Full Monty, the film it most resembles. The characters are true originals, from the pair of store-owners who mistakenly drink Grace's hemp leaves thinking they're tea, then spend the day giggling and stoned, to the drug dealer who can't complete the deal for fear of missing his Dungeons and Dragons session.

Or Matthew's girlfriend Nicky, who appears to be the only model-cum-fisherman who can gut salmon with the best of them. Another standout is Diana Quick as Grace's husband's mistress Honey. Honey and Grace, it turns out, have a lot in common and even share a drink over her dead husband's erection, or lack thereof.

And of course, the ever-desirable Tcheky Karyo (La Femme Nikita) as the French drug dealer who develops a crush on Grace. Karyo usually plays the bad guy in films like Addicted to Love, but is far more appealing as the sex-on-toast character he plays here.

What is most surprising about the film is that is carried almost entirely by a middle-aged woman with a pot belly and bags under her eyes, who yet remains nonetheless engaging and attractive.Blethyn has proved with this film (and Little Voice) that Secrets and Lies was no fluke, and moreoever, that romantic leads, and leads in general, are not limited to the young.

While Saving Grace has a few great moments and some truly funny jokes, by the end of the film, the plot becomes so ludicrous and "happy" that you get the feeling the writers were stoned for days on end while they concocted the plot. The other problem with the film, which isn't really its fault, is that the marijuana plants look straight out of a bad prop house, or aquarium shop.

In some ways Saving Grace begs to be bent another way, into a world as protected and trusting as the fishing village in which it takes place, a world where growing a harmless weed would be a matter of choice, not breaking the law. The town, its people and, ultimately, the film seem reminders of what should be, not what is.

The hot-button subject of marijuana was probably the reason the film got made and certainly the reason the film is talked about at all. But it's the relationships between this talented cast of original characters, most of whom we've never seen in movies before, that ultimately saves the film for both its protagonist and its audience.

CineScene, 2000