Acting Up: Grant Rosenmeyer Wraps Himself in a Blanket of Grief in ‘The Secret Art of Human Flight’

August 20, 2024 | Neil Turitz
Photo via Tribecafilm.com.

The Snapshot

In The Secret Art of Human Flight, Grant Rosenmeyer plays Ben Grady, a children’s book writer who just lost his wife and, in his grief, turns to a mysterious self-help guru who promises to help him unlock the power to fly.

(The Secret Art of Human Flight hits theaters on August 23.)

Grant Rosenmeyer’s Performance in The Secret Art of Human Flight

Ben Grady is sad. He just lost his wife in a tragedy and can’t believe she’s gone. He doesn’t know what to do and, by the way, the police are sniffing around because of how she died.

Ben and his wife Sarah had a fight, he went out, and when he came back a half hour later, she was dead on the kitchen floor because of an allergic reaction to something she ate. Just like that, a vibrant, talented young woman in her early 30s, is gone.

Ben and Sarah were a writing team who had just earned big success with their first children’s book but were struggling with their second. The police think that Ben may have killed Sarah to get an insurance payout. One look at Ben and the audience knows that’s not true. He is overcome with grief. He is bereft. He is paralyzed. He is lost.

Just last week, we covered Nick Jonas playing a young man dealing with grief, and doing so with humor while keeping it at arm’s length. This is the other side of it.

Grant Rosenmeyer’s Ben wraps himself in grief like it’s a blanket. He folds himself up in it. He dives into a lake and holds his breath to see how long he can last. The loss of Sarah is beyond anything he can handle, which makes sense when the movie starts. Then, as the movie continues, we start to learn more about Ben and Sarah’s relationship and that things were not as rosy as they appeared from the outside. Then that grief turns into something else.

The trick of playing grief is to never lose the audience’s sympathy by becoming morose. We all experience grief. It’s maybe the most relatable of any emotion, because not all of us are happy, not all of us are angry, not all of us are depressed, but all of us, at some point, lose someone close to us.

We don’t go to the movies, generally speaking, to see someone be depressed about losing someone, because while we like seeing ourselves onscreen, we don’t like it if it’s maudlin. We’re maudlin in our own lives. We don’t need to see some schmuck playing it. That’s a bummer.

But what if there’s something else to that grief? What if the grief makes you want to get up and do something? That, ultimately, is what makes both The Secret Art of Human Flight and Rosenmeyer’s performance so interesting.

The story allows Ben to pursue a flight of fancy (no pun intended), with Paul Raci’s guru walking him through a seemingly insane series of tasks to help Ben find something deep inside of himself that will allow him to “fly,” though of course, that’s a metaphor (Or is it? Go see the movie to learn for yourself).

Raci, who earned an Oscar nomination for his brilliant work in 2019’s Sound of Metal and developed and executive produced this movie, is the perfect voice to guide Ben through his ordeal. He is calm. He is wise. Every tattoo on his body —and there are lots of them— tells the story of a man with experience. It’s an experience that Ben doesn’t have, but desperately needs, because he is flailing, and he requires something to latch onto so that he doesn’t completely lose it.

Without giving away too much, Ben does lose it a bit, and there are some deep valleys into which he falls, but Rosenmeyer never loses us. He never crosses over into a place where we stop and say, “Okay, for cryin’ out loud, we get it.”

His grief is not just about losing his wife, but also about the slow understanding of what his marriage was. There’s a complexity to that which Rosenmeyer nails. His grief is universal. We all feel it and we understand it because he sees how bad it’s become and he is willing to do anything, literally anything, to relieve it. Those moments when he stops to explain to his sister and her boyfriend (Lucy DeVito and Nican Robinson, respectively) what he’s doing and why, are some of the strongest in the film.

But that willingness to go far beyond any preconceived boundaries to get to a place of understanding and calm is also universal and relatable, and it makes us want to hug him. For an actor playing grief, that’s pretty much the goal.

The Career of Grant Rosenmeyer

Grant Rosenmeyer first showed up on screen in The Royal Tenenbaums as one of Ben Stiller’s tracksuit-wearing sons, and he has grown up in front of us, just as Jonas has. But that’s about where the similarities end. 

Jonas is a rock star and a teen idol. Rosenmeyer is, well, neither of those things. He’s almost a throwback, a leading actor in a character actor’s body. Kind of short, round face, not exactly sporting a six-pack of abs. He’s not going to be mistaken for Brad Pitt, but then again, most actors don’t, and that’s why they’re employed.

We want to see real people up on screen, and that’s Grant Rosenmeyer in the flesh. Hell, he even played a young Tony Shalhoub in a 2005 episode of Monk. Sure, he was 14 years old, but it still takes a certain kind of actor to play that. 

Rosenmeyer has done more with his career than most child actors have. He’s worked steadily for over two decades, with appearances in TV shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Blue Bloods, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and dozens of movies, both features and shorts.

Now, at the age of 33, he has become an interesting leading man. The Secret Art of Human Flight is not his first starring role. That was Come As You Are, a remake of a popular Belgian film, in which he played a disabled man trying to get to a Montreal brothel that caters to people with special needs. It’s a feel-good movie that sometimes verges on schlock, but still comes through and puts a smile on your face.

In Come As You Are, Rosenmeyer plays a wheelchair-bound young man with grace and power, infusing the role with a strength that keeps the audience from ever feeling sorry for him or, here’s that word again, maudlin. It turns out, that might have been the perfect part to get him ready for this one.

Although not everyone will like The Secret Art of Human Flight, but it’s hard not to like Grant Rosenmeyer in it. 

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