Meanwhile Ken thinks of her as the most amazing woman on the planet with radiating energy, someone he’s been searching for his whole life. (Inexplicably, an abstract, out-of-place, animated sex scene takes over the screen in this moment.) As chronicled in Wilber’s book, she writes in her journal that she feels she already knows this perfect man. Treya calls their mutual attraction “love at first touch,” as the duo share an impromptu embrace during a dinner party at a friend’s home. The duo falls madly in love quickly, but we don’t get to understand why or how without any real introduction to either of them, an oversight worsened by a severe lack of chemistry between Suvari and Townsend. The film flashes back to the earlier part of that decade to show Treya meeting the famed academician, writer and philosopher Ken Wilber (Stuart Townsend, overacting), someone described as “the Einstein of consciousness” in his field. Increasingly, “Grace and Grit” comes across less as a genuine picture, and more as an awkward experiment on memory that liberally imitates the otherworldly “The Tree of Life” palette on the cheap, so much that it seems the entire movie was shot during the magic hour with an annoyingly overdone visual mandate to utilize glimmering lens flares as much as possible.Īfter a brief and confusingly incomplete scene used as a framing device - Treya Wilber (a committed yet unremarkable Mena Suvari) addresses a crowd somewhere and begins telling her personal story of love and loyalty in the 1980s - the movie’s problems surface promptly. It sadly feels like Siegel left gaping holes when transposing to screen the truth and the lived-in authenticity of Wilber’s book that has reportedly touched so many lives (his own included).

Grace and Grit by William Murphy