British actors and directors seem to have a special facility, perhaps fostered by their culture’s paradoxical twinning of tolerance for eccentricity with impatience for nonconformity, for taking the silliest, most innocuous stories and making them truly delightful. That’s the case with this surprisingly sweet little movie about an English country widow who turns to pot-farming.
When Grace (Brenda Blethyn, looking nearly as incredulous about marijuana as she did about her black daughter in Secrets & Lies) learns her husband’s suicide has left a mountain of bad debt, desperation drives her to employ the only talent a lifetime of pampered, genteel living in seaside Cornwall afforded her: garden savvy. Aided by her now unemployed handyman Matthew (Craig Ferguson, who plays Nigel on “Drew Carey”), and the sympathetic complicity of townspeople known for “complete and utter contempt of the law” (the apocalyptic superlumination of her greenhouse becomes regular nightly entertainment), she raises a hydroponic bumper-crop of killer cannabis. Things get a bit more dicey, however, when it comes time to seek a buyer in London, where Grace literally runs smack-dab into the French connection.
Yes, Saving Grace is laced with much broad buzz-humor. And yes, the only unpredictable thing about its ending is that Woody Harrelson doesn’t show up. But it’s remarkably good-natured throughout, and boasts several comic buildups that in the hands of someone other than first-time feature director Nigel Cole, whose sitcom background isn’t a liability given the rampant insanity of the BBC, mightn’t have been nearly so memorable. And the script, co-written by Ferguson and “Lonely Planet” traveler Mark Crowdy, is peppered with casually engaging wit and energy, as when the goggle-eyed local bartender (character actor Paul Brooke) launches into a comparison of the novels of Kafka and Jackie Collins. I guess you could say such humor is, umm, well-cultivated. B
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