DaytonDailyNews.com

Grade: B-

Verdict: An amusing, typically English dry comedy about a cash-strapped widow's new career as a pot pusher.

Details: Starring Brenda Blethyn, Craig Ferguson. Rated R for drug content and language. One hour, 33 minutes.

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Review: The quaint little town of Cornwall, England, where middle-aged gardener extraordinaire Grace Trevethen lives, feels like it's stuck in an earlier, simpler time. So does the comedy Saving Grace, about her industrious climb to independence through drug dealing.

Remember those trendy, ephemeral films of the '60s and '70s like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, in which conventional, up-tight adults have their first encounter with marijuana and, after wondering why the weed's not working, they dissolve into pools of laughter? Well, here is another one, a wry little fable about a widow shackled with debts, who primly takes a short stroll on the criminal side, pushing pot to ease her money woes.

The sublime Brenda Blethyn (Secrets & Lies) consumed by a giggle fit is a sight to be treasured. The movie does come down squarely on the side of the demon drug, or at least it endorses Grace's cottage industry as the lesser evil to being foreclosed upon and thrown out of her centuries old residence. After all, the townfolk, from the vicar to the police constable to the charity donation lady who hides her collection box from the generous Grace, all merrily conspire to help her out of trouble.

Collectively, they save Grace, not unlike the Irish brood that schemed to defraud the national lottery in Waking Ned Devine, another slight, whimsical movie this might bring to mind. It has no interest in being held up to the scrutiny of logic, but draws us into its web of deceit for a drily farcical good time.

First time feature director Nigel Cole has enough confidence in his story to start slowly, even somberly, before kicking the comedy into high -- pardon the expression -- gear. It begins at the funeral procession of Grace's late husband, a possible suicide who fatally jumped from an airplane, leaving a trail of bad investments and a staggering mortgage for his wife.

As she is about to lay off her trusty groundskeeper, Matthew (Craig Ferguson, the movie's co-producer and co-writer), he asks for some horticultural assistance for his cherished, but clandestine, hemp plants. When Grace shows him the wonders of hydroponics and artificial sunlight, he shows her the joys of rolling and smoking the leaves. It is a matter of time before a joint -- pardon, again -- business venture forms.

Donning her most conspicuous white suit and wide-brimmed, garden club hat, Grace travels to London's funky, multicultural Notting Hill neighborhood. She sidles up to likely customers and ineptly tries to sell them some of her Miracle-Gro grass. Eventually, she encounters a small-time, aging hippie pusher (Bill Bailey) and a debonair, but dangerous French drug lord (Tcheky Karyo).

Upping the stakes at risk if they get caught is a subplot involving Matthew's disapproving girlfriend Nicky (Valerie Edmond), a fisherwoman who learns she is pregnant. Their romantic woes are played pretty straight, but the rest of the town's characters are strictly comic inventions. Cole casts some marvelous, weathered British faces, notably Phyllida Law and Linda Kerr Scott, a pair of old biddy shopkeepers who brew tea from the marijuana leaves and dissolve with laughter into a box of breakfast cereal.

Against such broad comedy, it is not hard for Blethyn to stand out with her deft underplaying and meticulous timing. She levitates this otherwise flimsy hour and a half of mirth, becoming its saving grace. There is nothing profound in this movie, but it shines through so many of this summer's dumb Hollywood comedies like a beacon through a haze of smoke.

— Hap Erstein, Cox News Service