Nearing Grace Exceeds Low Expectations Movie Review
By JungHa Lim ’09
News Staff Reporter
I’m not going to lie: I didn’t have high expectations for Nearing Grace. I had never heard of the movie before, and I had been told that the premise of the movie dealt with adolescents in the 1970s, their lives characteristically and predictably inundated with sex, infatuations, parties, and drugs. This theme has been so overdone that I couldn’t imagine an original way to approach it; I don’t think anyone was particularly excited for this movie. When the movie was over, however, I was left with a feeling of reasonable contentment.
Among student viewers, the various reactions to this film ultimately reached one consensus: Nearing Grace was well done according to the theme, the portrayal of adolescence in the 1970s was quite accurate, and the dialogue was very natural. Also impressive was the way in which the underlying sepia tones of the colors and the quality of the movie made it seem as if it were actually made in the 1970s. People seemed to have two major gripes about the film: some viewers felt that the ending scene in which Henry’s plane dramatically soars into the sky against the sunset was an extremely corny, unsatisfactory ending to a decent movie and that the concept of the film had already been done numerous times.
Overall, Nearing Grace, though slightly clichéd, was nevertheless enjoyable.
