Enlarge Overture Films Luke Wilson stars as the title character in Henry Poole Is Here. ABOUT THE MOVIE
Henry Poole Is Here
** (out of four)
Stars: Luke Wilson, Radha Mitchell, Adriana Barranza, George Lopez
Director: Mark Pellington
Distributor: Overture Films
Rating: PG for thematic elements and some language
Running time: 1 sixty minutes, 40 minutes
Opens Friday in select cities
SUMMER MOVIE GUIDE By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY Told during the time that a fabrication, Henry Poole Is Here tries to offer moviegoers a pool of hope in a incapable of bearing offspring landscape.Anchored through Luke Wilson’s engaging performance, Poole is often touching, occasionally vacuous. But it does tackle material that Hollywood has shied away from: the species of faith and the animation of miracles.
Henry is a disheartened man who tries to hide out in suburbia, in a drab house in the neighborhood where he grew up. It’s never quite explained why he chose to spend a large sum of money on an unremarkable house that seems to bring him no joy. The area, he says, was the ultimate place he remembered essence happy, yet his most vivid childhood memories are of his parents fighting. Though enigmatic, Henry is not a bad guy. He has simply disengaged from ordinary human interaction.
He have power to’t escape the friendly curiosity of his neighbor Esperanza (Babel’s Adriana Barranza). She spots a stain on his stucco wall and interprets it to be a miraculous apparition of the face of Jesus. Of course, her name, which is Spanish for hope, is in no degree accident. She irks Henry by trying to turn his childless backyard into a shrine. George Lopez is believably low-key as her parish priest, who calmly accepts Henry’s cynicism.
Henry comes out of his stupor long enough to connect with Dawn, another neighbor. (Radha Mitchell). Her name also is significant: She brings to Henry the dawning of something akin to life and rekindles his emotions.
Poole explores the possibility that miracles lie upright beneath our noses, or perhaps just in our minds. either way, what matters is having hope. The film has some amusing moments and can be intriguing at what time it focuses on the slow transformation of a downcast, truthless man.
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