Henry Poole is Here

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

There's a version of Henry Poole is Here that I would've liked to see, and the painful thing is that it's not that far off from the real thing. I can watch a movie about a depressed guy, drinking himself to death, who's disturbed from his internal stupor when his neighbor interprets a stain on his stucco wall as the face of Christ. There's a version of it I think could be really good.

The guy would be a skeptic, of course, but as "every holy roller within a hundred mile radius" begins hearing about the wall and the nice girl from the supermarket claims touching the stain restored her vision, he would soon have to accept that, while maybe he doesn't subscribe to their particular religion, faith is a powerful thing, and maybe having something to believe in could awaken himself to life again.

That's basically what Henry Poole is Here gives us -- it's just that the pieces don't fit together quite right for the film's emotional impact to be successful. The soundtrack is overbearing and overly "spiritual." There are too many slow-motion soft-focus montages of Henry looking sad when the director, Mark Pellington, should've just done away with the bells and whistles and trusted Luke Wilson to sell the character to us. (He does.)

The script has one too many cutesy elements: did we really need characters like Dawn or Patience? Or yet another case of a cute kid who doesn't speak? I don't know what Hollywood's fascinating is with kids who refuse to talk, but I've never, ever heard of a voluntarily mute child in real life. (Well, I guess it's not hard to understand: it's easier to direct them that way, and they usually give better performances.)

And the ending is just embarrassing: screenwriter Albert Torres chickens out, basically. We know how it's going to end (early on, when we learn about why Henry's depressed), we psychologically prepare ourselves for how it's going to end, but then just as we're ready for it -- just kidding! They go for the nonsensical "happy" ending instead of the satisfying one.

The story has a good hook: we've all heard news reports about people seeing God or the Virgin Mary in a stain or a shadow. And the actors are impressive; Wilson leads a uniformly strong cast that includes Babel's Adriana Bazzara, and George Lopez, who's amiably low-key in the role of a priest. Rachel Seiferth, as the girl from the supermarket, is easy to love. Radha Mitchell is good as the cute single mom next door, although man, if