Grade: D-
Miracles play a central role in this oddball fantasy, but the picture itself certainly isn’t miraculous. A weirdly whimsical piece of anti-secularist, pro-superstition propaganda, “Henry Poole Is Here” is a movie that isn’t all there. Director Mark Pellington previously specialized in mysteries (“Arlington Road,” “The Mothman Prophecies”), but in this case the only mystery is whatever could have possessed him to make it.
The title character, played with his customary lack of energy by Luke Wilson, is a depressed guy who moves into a run-down ranch house in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb after his bid on another place down the street—his childhood home, as we later learn—was turned out. Henry buys a lot of booze, as Patience (Rachel Seiferth), the myopic checkout girl at the local grocery observes, and drinks it all by himself as he sulks all day. He’s not even sociable with his garrulous next-door neighbor Esperanza (Adrianna Barrazza, far too broad)), who stops by with a housewarming gift and informs him that the house was formerly owned by her erstwhile gentleman friend, who collapsed and died in it.
On the other side of the property lives divorced mom Dawn (Radha Mitchell, pretty but vacuous), whose young daughter Millie (the less-than-adorable Morgan Lily) has been mute and withdrawn ever since her father left. The girl also surreptitiously records peoples’ conversations, including one between Henry and his real estate agent (chirpy Cheryl Hines), who took it upon herself to fix up Poole’s place with a new stucco job on the outside wall before he moved in.
It’s that unwanted repair that’s the key to the plot. Catholic Esperanza sees the face of Christ in a water stain on it, and before long has brought her equally gullible friends and her parish priest (George Lopez, strangely subdued) to view it, instigating an ecclesiastical investigation. Henry, who wants nothing but to be left alone, is angry at the interruption. As we learn, he’s been told by his doctor (Richard Benjamin) that he has only a short time to live—he has one of those movie diseases that kills without actually causing disablement or pain, it seems—and has come back to the old neighborhood to make some sort of peace with the memories of his unhappy youth before dying. But he reluctantly agrees.
Before long, his rationalistic skepticism about “the face on the wall” is shaken. A spot of red liquid on the stain is taken to be blood and sent for testing. Little Millie approaches the spot and suddenly begins talking again. The myopic grocery clerk does likewise and immediately tosses away her glasses, her sight restored. And Henry starts breaking out of his shell, getting close to little Millie, and even more to Dawn (whose name, it would appear, is intended to represent spiritual enlightenment just as Esperanza’s indicates the hope that’s offered to him). Faith doesn’t move mountains here, but it does cure blindness, reverse the effects of childhood trauma and even defeat death itself.
That’s because a still greater miracle awaits when the church’s queries reveal that the red spot on Henry’s wall is indeed blood. That revelation further challenges Poole’s obstinate refusal to accept the hand of God in his affairs, even as the scientific facts he’s put all his confidence in turn out to be completely wrong. (One of the most curious aspects of Albert Torres’ script is that while we’re supposed to accept the fallibility of science as a given—especially of medicine, whose ineptitude is dramatized in a ridiculous scene in which a nurse can’t even draw blood from a patient correctly, always fumbling her aim—it’s taken for granted that the blood test performed by the church lab must be accurate.) Final score: religion (or more properly, superstition), 3 at least; agnosticism (or if you prefer, atheism), 0 at best.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with a movie’s espousing religious faith. But if it’s going to deliver what amounts to a sermon, it had better be a good one, expertly delivered. By resolving all its characters’ problems in the most simplistic fashion, in the end this picture becomes risible. And while it would be unfair to doubt the sincerity of its makers, it’s entirely proper to criticize their hamfistedness. In issuing a blanket indictment of disbelief and a secularism that it portrays as completely blind and cynical, while exalting faith of the most unthinking sort, “Henry Poole Is Here” becomes a shaggy God story, theological Capracorn that will be indigestible except to the already converted.