State of Grace (1990)

Plot: Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) returns home to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen after a ten year absence. He soon hooks up with childhood pal Jackie (Gary Oldman) who is involved in the Irish mob run by his brother Frankie (Ed Harris). Terry also rekindles an old flame with Jackie’s sister Kathleen (Robin Wright). Soon, however, Terry is torn between his loyalty to his friends and his loyalties to others.

Director: Phil Joanou

Writing Credits: Dennis McIntyre

Cast: Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, John Turturro, John C. Reilly, R.D. Call, Joe Viterelli & Burgess Meredith

Music by: Ennio Morricone

Genre: Crime / Drama / Thriller

Budget: $5,000,000

Filming Dates: June 15, 1989 – September 22, 1989

Filming Locations: New York, USA

USA Release Date: September 14, 1990

MPAA rating: R (brief nudity, extreme profanity and violence)

Runtime: 134 minutes

Robin Wright as Kathleen Flannery

In ‘State of Grace’, Robin Wright inhabits the role of Kathleen Flannery, a woman torn between blood ties and her desperate longing for peace in a world built on violence.

Kate Flannery is intelligent, fierce and emotionally impenetrable, a woman who has seen too much to believe in easy redemption. The tenderness of her youth has hardened into cold resolve. She has built a life apart, far from the blood-soaked streets of her childhood.

Kate carries scars from growing up amid the violence of her brothers, Frankie (Ed Harris) and Jackie (Gary Oldman), two high-ranking figures in Hell’s Kitchen’s Irish-American mob. Unlike them, she deliberately built walls around her heart, determined never to be pulled back into their world.

Yet the past comes crashing back. When her childhood love, Terry Noonan (Sean Penn), returns after years away, Kathleen’s defenses quiver. Their reunion ignites old passions, but also unearths deep mistrust. She feels the pull of old love, but she resists it with a glacial stillness. She senses that Terry carries secrets and her instincts prove right.

Her coldness is not cruelty; it is survival, a shield forged from years of grief and disillusionment.

One of the most powerful aspects of Kathleen’s character is that she’s not just the film’s romantic lead: she’s the moral heart of the movie. Kate is not just a love interest, but a woman fighting to define her own path, even as the world around her tries to drag her back.

Kathleen represents the heartbreaking reality of those who want to leave behind a life of crime, but are forever tied to it by blood and history.

Robin Wright’s performance is exquisitely layered balancing Kathleen’s warmth with an icy edge. She gives Kate a powerful strength, a simmering sorrow and moments of raw vulnerability that cut through her stoic façade. She infuses every scene with a blend of grace, rage, fear, and steely resolve.

Her final scenes are heartbreaking. As she watches the St. Patrick’s Day parade alone, Kathleen Flannery becomes a symbol of everything lost to loyalty, revenge and history.

Trivia

Sean Penn and Robin Wright became a couple during the filming of this movie, had two children over the next three years, broke up, then got back together before finally marrying in 1996.