One of the things that strikes me the most about Wake Up Dead Man is the portrayal of Grace Wicks.
Normally when a character (usually a woman) who starts the story being villified and villainised, just as Grace was deemed "the harlot whore" for 60 years, their redemption in the eyes of the story comes from the revelation that they were a better person than people gave them credit for. Maybe they were a good mother, or did their best in the face of the deck being stacked against them.
With Grace, we don’t see that. I can’t recall any instance in the movie of her being a particularly good person, or a good mother to Jefferson Wicks, or a virtuous woman as befitting her name. A lot of her actions are recontextualised to be more understandable within the story, yes, but that’s not necessarily the same.
Grace is messy. Some would call her shallow with her focus on expensive brands. She’s unashamedly destructive. She probably wouldn’t have wanted her father’s church where she was pretty much held hostage for years to be named after her, even if the Wicks family weren’t in charge anymore.
And she STILL didn’t deserve what Prentice Wicks and her family did to her, whether she was a good person or not.
There are no perfect victims. Trauma, shocker, tends to mess with people’s mental state a lot, and they’re not always going to act the way people think they should. They can’t always be, well, graceful about it- I dare say they can’t be EXPECTED to be.
And people don’t have to be perfect or even particularly good people to be sympathised with as victims.
And it didn’t take anyone finding out about her secret better side or good deeds. All it took was one person - Vera - having a change in perspective, to consider things from Grace’s point of view and realise she never really had a chance to BE a better person, to plant that idea in the heads of the characters and the audience.
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