SAVING GRACE

SAVING GRACE portrays a woman left with huge debts after the death of her husband. Forced with the situation of losing her house, she turns to selling marijuana to get out of her troubles.

After her husband’s death, Grace (Brenda Blethyn) must deal with the aftermath of debt left from bad business deals and depletion of their accounts, unbeknownst to her. Her gardener, Matthew (Craig Ferguson), stays by her side, despite not being paid, and even tries to help her deal with the situation. Grace is a gifted gardener, with a main focus on orchids. She even belongs to a women’s floral society group and insists on having the meeting at her house, where it has always been, even though they know she is in debt. As she tries to think of some way to save her house, she stops answering the phone and opening the mail from the collectors.

One day, Matthew asks for her help with some plants that he has growing in the clergy’s yard. They sneak over to the yard at night and, upon seeing that they are marijuana plants, Grace exclaims to Matthew, “I’m not stupid!” However, with her tender heart as a gardener, she tells Matthew to bring one of the distressed plants to her greenhouse. Amazingly, within 48 hours she nurses the plant back to health, and Matthew is pleased.

With her financial situation growing more desperate, she asks Matthew curiously what the product, the buds, from the marijuana plants are worth. When he tells her their worth she is immediately interested, and throws out all of her orchids to make room to grow more marijuana plants. Matthew helps her out, expecting to share in the profit when they harvest the crop.

Meanwhile, Matthew’s girlfriend, who has recently found out she is pregnant with their child, gets upset over the possibility of losing Matthew because of a jail sentence. She pleads with him to be more responsible and stay away from participating in illegal activity, though she doesn’t tell him that she’s pregnant. Matthew tells her that he just wants to earn money for them and help Grace at the same time.

When the marijuana is ready to sell, Matthew assumes it is time for him to go to London to find a dealer. Grace, aware of the tension between Matthew and his girlfriend, decides to go herself, though she is unfamiliar with the seedy parts of the city. She eventually meets with a drug dealer and from there chaos erupts. Eventually, Grace realizes that the money is not important enough for anyone to get in trouble illegally and comes up with a creative way to solve the problem.

Brenda Blethyn does an admirable job in her portrayal of Grace, who is a somewhat naïve, yet tenderhearted woman involved in an unlikely situation. Despite this movie being well done in both acting and writing, the plot deals with illegal drug activity and some adult situations. This aspect, along with foul language, brief male nudity, alcohol, and drug use, makes SAVING GRACE a disgrace in some aspects.