PARK CITY, Utah — Last year's big road-trip tale at the Sundance Film Festival was greeted with guffaws. This year's has met with sobs.

Both "Little Miss Sunshine" from last year and the current Sundance entry "Grace is Gone" are highway heartbreakers, "Sunshine" showing a family that comes together through hilarious adversity, "Grace" depicting a family shattered by the cruelest of tragedies.

Starring John Cusack, "Grace" tells the story of a stern, loving but emotionally distant father who learns his wife, an Army sergeant, has been killed in Iraq. Unable to tell his two young daughters, he takes them on a trip to an amusement park, buying a few days before he has to break the news.

First-time director James C. Strouse's script came Cusack's way at just the right moment. Angry that the Bush administration had banned media footage of coffins coming home bearing soldiers killed in Iraq, Cusack had been looking to tell the story behind one of those coffins.

Cusack, 40, also was interested in doing something "that didn't have me in it in a lot of ways." His character, Stanley Phillips, is a humble family man, an atypical role for the actor whose credits include plenty of misfits and fringe players in such films as "The Grifters," "Being John Malkovich" and "High Fidelity."

Mostly acting opposite adults in the past, Cusack spends most of his time in "Grace" in the company of Stanley's 12-year-old (Shelan O'Keefe) and 8-year-old (Grace Bednarczyk), both making their film debuts.

Unlike liberal-minded Cusack, Stanley is a true believer in the Iraq war who feels the United States has to take action overseas to protect itself, a man who wanted to serve in the military himself if not for his bad eyesight.

"I thought, how do you really get inside that and not editorialize or comment on him, not know better than him, not get in an argument with him, but love him absolutely and really try to understand where he's coming from and how he feels?" Cusack said.

Many people left Saturday night's premiere of "Grace is Gone" sniffling and teary-eyed, the simple yet powerful story immersing viewers in one family's sorrow while resonating with Americans' growing sentiment against the war.

"I hope it's the type of story that holds up five or 10 years from now," said director Strouse, who wrote "Lonesome Jim," which premiered at Sundance last year. "Part of the inspiration was to take it out of the war debate and just show real consequences and let that speak for itself. Not say one thing or the other, but just let people decide for themselves."