I finally did watch “Full of Grace”. To be honest I hated it. For one thing, it is full of super-tight closeups of the actors’ faces, and that really irritates me after a while. That prolonged bit with Mary staring directly into the camera, with that strange expression on her face, that gave me the creeps especially. Also, there were a lot of “arthouse cinema” gimmicks which I felt didn’t work, such as the repeated flashbacks, using deliberately overexposed film images with creepy-sounding voice-overs. It’s not that I don’t like arthouse films; I just don’t like it when someone tries to do that kind of thing, but does it badly.
My biggest complaint, though, was in the depiction of the apostles. They spend a lot of time just sitting around a table, complaining about how many problems the church has, and bemoaning the fact that they don’t know what to do. St. Peter, in particular, was shown as confused and indecisive. As I recall, he spent several scenes just sitting on the ground because he was discouraged and didn’t know what to do. What a very different portrait from what we see in Acts of the Apostles - after Pentecost, they are always full of zeal and energy, as the Holy Spirit inspires and directs them.
