| Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register,
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 It's not often that an explicitly Christian movie, indeed an explicitly Catholic one, escapes the toxic treacle of sentimentality and nostalgia or the pompous pedantry of polemics. Henry Poole is Here tackles miracles, faith, hope, doubt, despair and the difference Christ makes in real lives with straightforward honesty, intelligence and heart.
It's a good movie.
Henry Poole (played by an unhandsome, unshaven Luke Wilson) is a deeply despairing, completely isolated man facing a crisis armed only with pizza, vodka, depression and an iron grip on his privacy. He is surrounded by people he wishes not to notice and he insists that they not notice him.
He buys a house which appears to be the architectural embodiment of despair in a Los Angeles neighbourhood losing its grip on the middle class who sought haven there in the 1960s. It's not the house he wants, but he easily accepts that he won't get what he wants.
The film does not sugar coat, overdramatize or glamourize Poole's depression. He casts his eyes away from people, walks and talks like a zombie and the only emotion he can manifest is anger.
His neighbour Esperanza (Adriana Barraza, whom many will remember from Babel) breaks into Poole's world with the rather doubtful notion that the face of Christ has appeared in a stain on the back yard wall of his house.
"Don't you see it?" asks Esperanza.
"All I see is a water stain from a bad stucco job," answers Poole.
"You're not looking," insists Esperanza. "I know. It's hard to believe."
Esperanza's repeated intrusions into Poole's life have their roots in the previous owner of Poole's home, a man Esperanza fell in love with in her middle age who then died.
Esperanza's appeal to Poole to embrace faith is undermined by her apparent need for others to ratify her own belief. Poole gets a better argument from Patience, the Noam Chomsky-spouting check-out girl at the grocery store.
Patience doesn't simply dismiss Poole's depression or the reasons behind it.
"Sometimes you have to be sad to remind yourself your alive," says Patience. "It's better than feeling nothing."
The water stain, with its mysteriously reappearing streak of blood, seems to bring the damaged little girl next door out of an emotional coma that has kept her from speaking for a year. But this apparent miracle fails to convince Poole.
"It was a completely random event," he tells the girl's mother. "In real life things don't happen like that."
Nevertheless a minimal involvement in the life of the girl and her mother has the effect of restoring Poole's humanity.
When that falls apart, Poole becomes more than skeptical. He turns his anger on the people around him advocating faith and tries to expel the miracle seekers from his back yard. "Hope can't save you!" he yells as he pulls down his house on top of himself.
The movie doesn't insist on cheap grace — the idea that faith will simply make life easy and miracles will free us from every fear. But it does insist that it will make us more human.
Henry Poole is Here is not a perfect movie. Director Mark Pellington is a veteran of television and music videos and he uses music video tricks to move the plot and set an emotional tone. From Bob Dylan's "Not Dark Yet" to a band called The Bravery singing "Believe," the movie relies too heavily on songs to do things that actors speaking dialogue should do.
But such flaws are more than overcome by Barraza's tremendous performance as Esperanza and the film's unflinching look at what faith means right now for our time.
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