Ecklian Reviews: Henry Poole Is Here

Mark Eckel, Director, Mahseh Center, Lake Bruce, IN

 Hope does not always come in forms we expect or can explain.  Sometimes the face of Jesus must appear in a stain on a stucco house.  Other times, the house literally has to fall on a person to wake them up.  It is no mistake that words for hope, trust, and faith are so closely aligned with each other in religious frameworks: each is dependent on a world beyond our own.  It is this outside world that we cannot see, that we cannot explain, that invades inside our world. 

Hope can come in many forms, but always from outside ourselves.  Luke Wilson stars in a movie to ponder just such an idea: Henry Poole Is Here.  The inexplicable occurs to give hope to the hopeless.  Full of Christian imagery and truly caring believers, Henry is altered when he is forced to confront that which he cannot explain.  Coke-bottle glasses worn by the grocery store check out girl are unnecessary after touching the stained house wall.  Mute no more, a child next door speaks; a result of the same.  Church-goers line up around the house because they believe what they cannot describe may transform what they cannot change.  Henry himself has been diagnosed with an undivulged illness.  Believing his own death to be imminent, “It doesn’t matter” and “I won’t be here very long” are phrases Henry uses to deflect attention away from commitments, away from people, away from life.  

Characters enliven the tale.  The won’t-take-no-for-an-answer next door neighbor (Adriana Barraza), the Catholic priest (George Lopez), Millie whose eyes mesmerize (Morgan Lilly), Dawn (Rahda Mitchell) the romantic seeing inside Henry’s shell, and the cashier (Rachel Seiferth) all add flavor to a sweet story.

Albert Torres wrote the original screenplay for Henry Poole.  After failed attempts at penning scripts in Hollywood, Torres quit trying.  He changed course.  Two years later he realized his “undefined sadness” was because he was not writing.  “Rather than write a movie I thought I could sell or one I thought others would like, I wrote a movie I wanted to see. I emerged from a desperate time, looking for a little hope and Henry Poole was born.”[1]  After suffering the devastating death of his wife, Mark Pellington created a film to reflect upon the realities of life lived after loss.[2]  Henry Poole Lives Here is an example of reflection leading to hope.

Both Pellington and Torres maintain that the movie is not “pushy” about faith.  References to Jesus’ face, miracles, and Catholicism are simply to move the story along.  Henry Poole indeed succeeds without preaching.  But there is no mistaking a movie which depends on its most prominent character, Who is invisible, other-worldly, unexplained but always there. 

Rated PG for a few uses of profane language and adult situations. 

[1] http://www.moviehole.net/200815721-caffeinated-clint-henry-poole-is-here

[2] John Anderson.  “After a Devastating Loss, A New Subtext.” New York Times 10 August 08: AR9. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/movies/10ande.html retrieved 27 January 09.

It was midnight when she called.  I heard the crashing of Lake Michigan waves mixed with Chelsea’s emotions smashing against the shoreline.  My daughter recounted a conversation she had had with a young atheist, for whom her heart ached.  She cried explaining the fellow classmate’s desire for something or someone to meet his expectation.  For all her college years Chelsea has referred to herself as a “female Apollos” using the “apologetic of hope” with her peers.  My daughter knows hope, lives hope, and gives hope to others. 

In her Mystery and Manners, a writer’s self-description, Flannery O’Connor explains the core of any good story, storyteller, and story-reader: 

…people without hope do not write novels…I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality.  It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.  If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.  People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.[1]  

Simply said, reality demands hope in a supernatural world.  “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for example, causes one to gasp aloud in response to the depth of human sin and the necessity of divine grace.  Hope to overcome the first is impossible without the second. 

Hope is at the core of reflection.  The Old Testament words for “hope” mean to look forward to with eager expectation.[2]  Often translated “wait,” Christians base their anticipation of the future in whom they wait.  “Hope in God”[3] is the command based on the fact that Yahweh is “the hope of Israel.”[4]  Even Job in his agony declared, “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.”[5]  “Wait for The Lord” the Psalmist says twice in Psalm 27:14, overloading the sentence in Psalm 130:5, “I wait for Yahweh, my whole person waits, I wait in His Word.”  

Why would we reflect if we have no hope, no expectation of Someone or something beyond ourselves?  Glenn Tinder masterfully exposes the bankrupt nature of human hope as so-called “progress” in his essay The Fabric of Hope.  Likening our experience to an actor in a play, he says we know that there is a world outside ourselves on stage.  That life transcends the drama.  There is a world outside the theatre, so our hope is “an orientation toward eternity, presupposes a degree of detachment-the detachment inherent in the consciousness of belonging not only to an earthly city but to a heavenly city as well. . . .”[6]  Our troubles in this world cannot be overcome by empty political promises of “hope” which have no certainty, separated from history and transcendence.  Micah 7:7 says what we mean, “I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.” 

Hope can come in many forms, but always outside ourselves.  Luke Wilson stars in a movie to ponder just such an idea: Henry Poole Lives Here.  Sometimes the inexplicable occurs to give hope to the hopeless.  Full of Christian imagery and truly caring believers, Henry is altered when he is forced to confront that which he cannot explain.  After suffering his own devastating loss, Mark Pellington created a film to reflect upon the realities of life lived after loss.[7]  Henry Poole Lives Here is an example of reflection leading to hope. 

My preaching days began when I was 13.  The first sermon I ever wrote began this way: “A person can live 40 days without food, 3 days without water, 5 minutes without air, but not one second without hope.”  Here is to Flannery O’Connor, my daughter, and all those other “apologists of hope.”  May their stories, their poems, their films cause many to reflect and so, to hope.  No one can live without it. 

[2] John E. Hartley. 1980. qawa. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. (Moody): 2:791-92 and Paul R. Gilcrist. 1980. yachal. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. (Moody): 1: 373-74.

[3] Psalm 42:5, 11; 43:5; 130:7

[4] Jeremiah 14:8; 17:13; 50:7.

[5] Job 13:15.

[6] Glenn Tinder. 1999. The Fabric of Hope: An Essay. (Emory University): 123.  Tinder’s philosophical commentary should be read by all interested Christians intending to invest their life in political life.

[7] John Anderson.  “After a Devastating Loss, A New Subtext.” New York Times 10 August 08: AR9. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/movies/10ande.html retrieved 27 January 09.