SUNDANCING WITH HENRY POOLE

Craig Detweiler — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:00:24 -0800

The Sundance Film Festival is always full of surprises. Some are snappy like Little Miss Sunshine or silly like Napoleon Dynamite. Others are serious like An Inconvenient Truth. A surprising number of Sundance movies are deeply spiritual. They range from the dark comedy of Adam’s Apples to the heartfelt drama of Save Me.

For five years, I’ve taken a group of students to Sundance in search of transcendent moments. We call our gathering the Windrider Forum. At the 2008 fest, we were surprised by the sublime charms of Henry Poole is Here. Yet, like many independent films, it experienced a quiet death at the box office. I kickoff off the 2009 edition of Sundance with a tribute to this overlooked gem, starring Luke Wilson.

Henry Poole is Here may be the most downbeat film ever made about faith. Despite miraculous moments, it maintains dour, minor chords throughout. Director Mark Pellington forces the audience to take on Henry’s mood. What happens when a loner wrestles with a terminal illness? What will it take to puncture his well-founded fatalism? Henry walks around in a drunken stupor. Vodka supplies his daily sustenance, until a blurry image oozes onto the stucco. Could it be the face of Christ?

A trio of faithful women come alongside our suffering hero. They bake Henry cookies, checking in, making sure he’s doing okay. His neighbors have symbolic monikers like Esperanza—‘hope’--and even the check out girl at the grocery store is named Patience. Esperanza sees the face of Jesus emerging from the stucco, but Henry’s skepticism keeps him from embracing his bland back wall. An even keeled priest, played by George Lopez, fails to cut through Henry’s depression.

But when Henry starts hanging around with a mute girl and her beautiful, divorced mother (the always appealing Radha Mitchell), we know he cannot possibly resist their dual charms for long. The earnest script by Albert Torres doesn’t contain many surprises. Yet, as the stucco gets under Henry’s cynical skin, so the story burrowed into my heart.

Henry Poole is Here takes place in the most anonymous suburban neighborhood possible. It was filmed on the “wrong” side of LA, the Eastside, in La Mirada. Why did Henry buy a house in this neighborhood? He is actually retracing his roots, connecting with both the painful and hope-filled moments of his childhood. So what about that face on the wall? Henry Poole plays it absolutely straight. No winking, no magic, no foolishness. Faith is affirmed.

Acclaimed music video director Mark Pellington took a major career turn to create Henry Poole. It’s muted tones contrast with his classic work on Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” INXS’s “Beautiful Girl” and U2’s “One.” What attracted him to a modest project like Henry Poole? It was a response to the tragic death of his wife, Jennifer Barrett-Pellington. He and his 2 and a half year-old daughter were left alone, heartbroken, in shock. Pellington told The New York Times, “I came to that point of my life where I questioned whether I wanted to live or not, because the pain was so severe,” he said. “I came out on the other side and said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to take every day for what it’s worth and embrace it, because each one might be the last.” Henry Poole became a passion project, a form of grieving, a chance to say something significant in a non-didactic way. In Entertainment Weekly, Pellington said, “All the central characters have dealt with loss in one way, shape, or form, and they’re changed or transformed through the course of the movie. A hopeless man finds hope, and a faithless man finds faith.”

The Christian community often rails against Hollywood, begging for faith-affirming films. Yet, when a minor miracle like Henry Poole arrives, it is often met with indifference. It slipped into Sundance rather quietly. It wasn’t discovered in theaters. Now, a year later, maybe Henry Poole will find the audience he definitely deserves.