God, poor Mark Pellington, the director of “Henry Poole Is Here. The former video director – Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy;” famous clips for NIN, Foo Fighters, The Flaming Lips; filmmaker behind “U2 3D” – lost his wife suddenly and tragically in a car accident four years ago and had to raise their 2 1/2-year-old daughter on his own.
Obviously the guy went through hell and back to make it through such devastation, so when you’re reading the press notes of ‘Henry Poole’ is here before the movie starts and being informed of all this tragedy, you can’t help but feel for the guy, side with him and understand his motivations to make a film rooted in touching and spiritual themes of life, death, love, loss, etc., even if those sentiments can be rather cliche. The notes are perhaps a ruse, but after reading them, you can’t help but be ingratiated to the guy and want him to succeed.
And then the movie starts. And if you’ve seen the trailer, man you quickly understand this film is some high-grade false advertising. Where’s the sweet, quirky, indie-romantic comedy we thought we were getting? Instead we get a middling drama about a sad-sack with few laughs and sure, there would be nothing wrong with that approach if it weren’t godawful. Luke Wilson plays a sad bastard (Henry Poole) that has given up all hope, wasting his days by drinking his life away. One day, serendipitously of course, his newly stuccoed outside wall has developed a stain that looks exactly like the face of Christ according to his fanatically religious and extremely annoying neighbor Adriana Barraza (an Academy Award nominee in “Babel,” she’s aggravating here).
She starts blabbing to the neighborhood which begets pilgrimages to Poole’s home to see the holy visage which annoys the depressed and bitter homeowner who then tries to scrub the stain off to no avail. Suddenly, the wall develops a tear of blood and bonafide miracles begin to occur and the film’s “magical wheels” begin to start turning. The lovely Radha Mitchell, the only one doing any real acting here, plays Poole’s divorced neighbor with a selectively mute child.
Now we’re kind of suckers for features with male, sad-sack protagonists that have to get over themselves and their solipsistic problems, but not when they’re riddled with tired cliches and replete with trite sentiments. ‘Poole’ starts out uneven, but not terribly, plodding along at a surprisingly slow and even keel, but somewhere along the mid-way point, the film bursts wide open into the great blue yonder of terrible. Pellington opens up the sun-soaking aperture, the slow-motion devices, warms up the crane shots and goes full on music video with tons of atrocious and painfully obvious musical montages – the movie devolves into one gigantic MTV video and you can’t help but recoil and cringe in pain and disgust.
‘Poole’ was never destined to be great, but it didn’t have to be one of the worst movies we’ve seen this year either. The last half just keep topping itself in insipid, trite gestures and by the last 10-15 minutes, you’re pretty much begging for it to end. Skip this one at all costs. [C-].
God, we’ve already wasted too much breath on this film, but we feel obligated to point out some music. The soundtrack details are here, the disc features songs by the Eels, Badly Drawn Boy and the Bravery to name a few, all used in variously lame ways in the movie. Not featured on the soundtrack, but in the movie are Blur’s “Song 2” (a cliche song if there ever was one laughably misused in a sequence where Poole tries to wash the stain off his wall) and Bob Dylan’s powerful and melancholy song of resignation, “It’s Not Dark Yet,” from 1997’s devastating Time Out of Mind. We obviously love the song, and the moment in the film isn’t terrible per se, but it’s nothing to write home about either. We haven’t even read one review of this film yet, but we won’t be shocked at all if every critic just roasts this film alive. Poor Pellington, good intentions from personal tragic experiences gone horribly awry.