CRITICAL MASS : Henry Poole flows with lyricism
Posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Poetry is the purest form of writing; it is the sidelong glance that reveals, if not everything, at least something interesting and true. Poetry distills and compacts meaning, strips it of all modifying adornment, and presents it naked and shivering.
Maybe a music video is to a narrative film as a poem is to a novel. And maybe one way to look at Henry Poole Is Here, a smart, sad and ultimately uplifting movie about despair, healing and possibly divine grace — God’s favor for humankind irrespective of works, or even faith — is as a lyric work, a series of visual poems beaded together along a strong narrative cord.
I suggest this to the film’s director, Mark Pellington, the burly son of an NFL linebacker (Bill Pellington, who played for the Baltimore Colts for 12 seasons including in the storied 1958 NFL championship game ). Pellington is a veteran director of videos, and while he has made a handful of movies that were successful on multiple levels — 1999 ’s Arlington Road, 2004 ’s The Mothman Prophecies and the underrated 1997 film Going All the Way among them — he may still be best known for his work with U 2 and Pearl Jam. He’s the guy who directed the video for “Jeremy.”
He seems to like the proffered analogy; he talks about finding a meter and a rhythm and how each shot becomes a search for some specific detail that reveals — as much as the dialogue and the action — what the movie is about. He takes it further and talks about how the film is like a piece of music, with different movements, motifs touched here and again here, and how his work (he hopes ) enhances the characters and story devised by writer Albert Torres.
“This is a very much a narrative complement to the work I’ve been doing in videos, especially the last four years,” Pellington says. “Each video was a place for me to process and put imagery. I’d also worked for years with poets. I did a series called The United States of Poetry for PBS... I’d made a documentary about my father and his struggle with Alzheimer’s, which was really like kind of a tone poem about loss and the frustration of not being able to communicate with him.”
Pellington says he can’t really look at his early film work without being embarrassed by the literal-mindedness of his technique. He thinks his first film, Going All the Way, is a pale shadow of the original novel.
“But, as you change as an artist, you do your first movie and then your second movie, you start to really understand the power of cinema and storytelling,” he says. “I break down scripts into beats and moments and those details, every choice, every sonic choice, and every editorial choice is very specific. It’s the same way I edit documentaries or videos or poetry pieces: Moment to moment, what does... every metaphoric and abstract choice mean, even if it’s invisible to the viewer ?”
Henry Poole, about a dying man (the title character played by Luke Wilson ) who returns to a house in his childhood neighborhood to spend his remaining time drinking and eating comfort food, is rife with these sorts of choices, to the point it may be vulnerable to critical eye-rolling and charges of preciousness. It could be taken the wrong way by some who might misconstrue its handling of religious issues as “pandering” to believers.
But the film isn’t a “Christian movie,” Pellington says; the impassioned Christians who invade Henry’s home after a stain that resembles a picture of Jesus Christ appears on its wall could be any species of faithfilled — they could be Eric Von Daniken adherents wishing to examine suspicious glyphs. The ambiguous image of Christ is just something in which they can invest their hope. Miracles needn’t necessarily be attributed to the intercession of the deity. In the end, Poole might not be saved, although he is definitely changed.
And so is the director.
In the film, a character named Patience touches the image of Christ and discovers she no longer needs her Coke-bottle glasses to see. She runs off, leaving the glasses on Henry’s lawn. When he returns them to her, she smiles at him and tells him they will make a fine “souvenir” of her previous life.
Pellington says that was one of the few lines he added to Torres’ script.
“My personal experience of dealing with loss... well, I call this my second life,” Pellington says. “I consider that I’m in my second life now.”
In 2004, while Pellington was working on The Mothman Prophecies, his wife, Jennifer Barrett-Pellington, a former model turned costume designer, died.
At the beginning of a video Pellington did in 2005 for British pop band Keane’s song “Everybody’s Changing,” the director talked about his loss:
“My wife, Jennifer, died, seven months ago, in kind of difficult circumstances, from a ruptured colon and a toxemia sepsis of the abdomen,” he says. “She was 42 years old and the mother of a 3-year-old girl, Bella. I lost my soulmate, mother of my child, my best friend, the kind of thing that made me feel safe in the world. And the person that made everything OK.”
Though the video, which featured statements by and images of Pellington’s grief support group, was never released through conventional channels (“ It was too depressing, ” Pellington says ) it has become something of a YouTube sensation. (Find it online by searching for Keane, Pellington, “Everybody’s Changing.” )
Pellington says he bottomed out after his wife’s death and that for a time the pain was so severe he wasn’t sure he wanted to continue to live. Making Henry Poole, a script he passed on years before, helped him find his way back to life.
“I’m sad for my loss but people experience that every day. I think it’s how you deal with it, and coming out of the other side now, I’m grateful for the transformation that’s happened, and this film being part of that, having the opportunity to make it and get it out there. So many of the intuitive, organic choices that I don’t even recall now... now that it’s done, now it’s later, it’s out in the world and it’s up to other people to interpret.”
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