GOING TO POT

'Saving Grace' Lights Up With Quirks, Qualms

Let's say it up front: This is a feel-good movie about drug cultivation. If
you have any prohibitive moral qualms that won't allow you to laugh (or,
more to the point, feel good) about a slightly doddery Cornishwoman growing
her own weed, don't plan to see it. Don't go near it.

Just. Say. No.

Otherwise, respond with quaint hallelujahs to "Saving Grace,'' a sweet,
nimbly amusing small-town conspiracy farce in the tradition of "Local
Hero'' or "Waking Ned Devine.'' While everything gets wrapped up a bit too
snugly at the end, Nigel Cole's ode to civil disobedience leaves a fuzzy
afterglow that has nothing to do with odoriferous fumes. It's an aw-shucks
film for frustrated drug-runners.

"Saving Grace'' (which opens today) works for several reasons, chief among
them the quavering gifts of its star, Brenda Blethyn. Blethyn, best known
to American audiences for her Oscar-nominated performance as a shattered
mother in "Secrets & Lies,'' is an actor of great intensity, idiosyncracy
and fire, but here, she's banked the intensity so that only a warm brush of
quirkiness peeks through. She's just the sort of flaky dame you'd expect to
turn her greenhouse into a pot farm.

Blethyn plays Grace Trevethyn, a recently widowed Englishwoman whose late
skunk of a husband left her with no money and an estate so thoroughly in
hock that she can't even pay Matthew, a blithe Scottish handyman
(co-screenwriter Craig Ferguson) with certain horticultural proclivities.
When Matthew asks her to help him salvage a couple of drooping cannabis
plants, her startled reluctance yields, ultimately, to her innate
gardener's sympathy for vegetable matter. ("I'm a gardener -- these are
sick plants,'' she explains).

Grace and Matthew move a couple of plants into her greenhouse. She nurtures
them. They thrive. Later, in a moment of pure Cheech & Chong revelation,
she realizes she could wipe out all of her money problems in one fell swoop
if she converted her greenhouse into a mass-scale marijuana ranch. She
ropes Matthew into her plan. She employs hydroponic solutions and lights of
blinding wattage. And the little green leaves, they grow.

So much of this is so adorable; when Matthew refers to his partner-in-crime
as "Dame reggae spliff,'' the incongruity of it hits like a bong -- I mean,
gong. As expected, cute old coots intake their fair share of reefer, often
inadvertently. They get the munchies, they giggle, they run around naked,
they wear silly, silly costumes and say silly, silly things.

In its final act, Ferguson's and Mark Crowdy's screenplay relies heavily on
this sort of gramps-gets-bombed scenario and, while it draws plenty of
laughs, it lacks the ludicrous gentility of the film's best moments.
"You're not a scum -- that worries me,'' hisses a drug kingpin at his eager
new supplier. "I take exception to that,'' Grace snaps in reply. "I come
from a long line of scum.''

Cole, an established British TV director, brings whimsy and pacing to his
debut feature, giving his cast plenty of room to get squiffy. There are
several fine actors in small roles: Phyllida Law (Emma Thompson's mother)
as a village shop owner, Martin Clunes as a doctor with high (way high)
ideals, Leslie Phillips as a sweet old vicar with a fondness for Hammer
Studio horror films of the 1950s and '60s. Ferguson, known on these shores
as Nigel Wick from "The Drew Carey Show,'' has a saw-toothed charisma that
provides a lovely balance to Blethyn's plucky Grace.

And Blethyn -- Blethyn's a dream, whether she's goggled up in her
greenhouse or evading the stuffy banker who's after her manor home. She's
the unlikely star of an unlikely pothead movie, a film that makes lighting
up seem as cozily unthreatening as a walk in the Cornish dusk.