Writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s “A Little Prayer,” about a family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is like a beautiful hand-wrought sculpture that’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Making it bigger would not have made it better. It’s perfect just as it is.
Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston) reside in a modest house in a quiet suburb, surrounded by tall, old trees that form a canopy over the streets. Venida has a day job as a docent giving tours of Old Salem, a historic district. Bill is a Vietnam War veteran who founded and still runs a local sheet metal factory. In the winter of their lives, they are still taking care of their kids, even though they’ve grown into adults with adult problems.
Bill’s son David (Will Pullen), who served in Iraq and now works as a manager at his father’s factory, lives in the guest house behind his parents’ place with his wife Tammy (Jane Levy). Soon enough, David’s younger sister, the manic and vulgar Patti (Anna Camp), shows up with her young daughter Hadley (Billie Roy), who’s cute but kind of a terror, and says she needs a place to live because she’s leaving her rotten husband. It is not the first time she’s done this.
He and Venida didn’t expect an empty nest to fill back up, nor did they expect their lives to be dominated by dramas they had nothing to do with. Nevertheless, here they are, dealing not just with Patti’s crisis and the expense of two additional residents, but with problems in David and Tammy’s marriage as well. The problems are David’s doing: he stays out late several nights a week, telling Tammy he’s putting in overtime when he’s actually having an affair with a coworker, Narcedalia (Natascha Polanco). Venida is oblivious, but Bill figures it out by observing David and Narcedalia’s body language, which all but screams, “They’re doing it!”
What does a father of Bill’s vintage do with such knowledge? He wants his children to be happy, but he also wants them to conduct their lives with honesty and good judgment. And he adores Tammy, a charming young woman who’s a ray of light in his life. Bill would be upset to find out that his son was cheating on her even if he and Venida didn’t hang out with Tammy every day, bantering in the kitchen. Then he gets another piece of information that he wishes he’d never heard, and it hits him even harder.
What, if anything, should Bill do with all these secret miseries? He’s in torment keeping them to himself, but revealing any of them could turn secrets into full-blown crises.
This sounds like the synopsis of a screamfest with slammed doors and broken plates. But that’s not what “A Little Prayer” gives us. MacLachlan keeps things delicate and hushed, rarely letting the temperatures of even agonizing moments rise above a simmer. He’s telling a story about the sorts of people who are more likely to implode than explode, or at least keep their detonations private.
The film is refreshingly content to present its characters in their complexity and contradiction, and ask that we accept them in totality rather than condemn them for their sins. David has no obvious reason to cheat on Tammy, but he’s doing it. Later, we get information suggesting that his infidelity is just one manifestation of a psyche that’s been in turmoil since he returned from Iraq; it’s not exculpatory, but it does make him something other than a rat husband. And it shows that he’s part of an endless cycle. There are multiple scenes set at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall where the factory employees go each Wednesday after work to drink and dance. At one such gathering, Bill asks a fellow Vietnam veteran why a mutual friend hasn’t come to the VFW hall yet, and is reminded that certain people emerge from that kind of experience never wanting to talk about it again. Neither approach is endorsed as being correct.
This is the kind of movie where you’re on everybody’s side, because life is hard and nobody’s perfect and none of these characters are irredeemable and you wouldn’t wish suffering on anyone who’s just out there doing the best they can (maybe on anyone, period). There’s a moment where a couple of lines of dialogue make us wonder if Bill is no saint, either, and his agitation over others’ bad choices is really about guilt over his own failures. Just when you start to root for one character against another, the movie provides a bit of information about the second character that softens your attitude and prompts you to consider your own imperfections.
Even Narcedalia is treated fairly. She’s not a caricatured “other woman,” but a full person with friends and an apartment and a past life. There’s a long scene late in the movie might make you respect her willingness to come to terms with her own misjudgments and choose a path that will at least make something positive out of them.
Like MacLachlan’s breakthrough script for 2005’s “Junebug,” “A Little Prayer” has a religious, specifically Christian, dimension that’s woven into the drama rather than superimposed onto it. The movie opens at dawn with the camera traveling through the lush green neighborhood where the family resides. A woman’s voice sings gospel on the soundtrack. It is loving, transcendent, and loud. Some in the area find the singing annoying. Bill and Tammy like it. Bill even asks Tammy to join him in a search to find the singer and introduce themselves.
That’s not as easy as it sounds. That heavenly voice sometimes seems like a stand-in for an elusive God whose presence seems undeniable at times, but suddenly becomes elusive or invisible. You can’t chase God. God either manifests or doesn’t. The montages of the green canopy of the neighborhood as the unseen, unknowable singer delivers the morning gospel evokes classic sequences in the works of Terrence Malick’s cinema. Malick’s movies, to quote a piece by David Roark that was published here in 2016, “function as cinematic liturgies that paint a distinctly Christian picture of the good life—the kingdom of God—reflecting the gospel story of creation, fall, redemption and restoration.” Roark calls Malick’s movies “liturgical,” a word that resonates with this movie’s title so perfectly that I doubt it’s a happy accident.
Everyone will have their own take on the film’s theological dimension. Mine is that Christianity, like most forms of spirituality, is ultimately about striving to reach a state of grace, not because it is objectively achievable, but because it the effort itself is ennobling and redeeming, and because it keeps us moving forward, trying to better ourselves and repair any damage we caused, which in turn makes a cruel world more bearable. Bill is given burdens that he didn’t ask for. He repeatedly asks permission to offload the burdens onto others, because their weight is crushing him, and it feels wrong to keep secrets from those he loves. What should a flawed but essentially decent man do?
The Bible presents multiple ways of looking at Bill’s problem, many of them contradictory. It’s not as if you can add them all together and divide by the total number of Bible quotes to get a spiritual average that can steer you towards the right choice. The multiplicity of angles from which people contemplate their lives, and other people’s lives, is another one of the movie’s dimensions: huddled beneath its umbrella are morality, moral relativism, compassion, and Scout’s advice in “To Kill a Mockingbird” that you should not judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. There will probably be at least one subplot in this film that captures something you have experienced or that happened to someone you know. Learning that your own problems aren’t unique and feeling not trivialized but consoled by realization is another glorious side benefit of the moviegoing habit, along with surround sound, trailers and hot buttered popcorn.
In one scene, Venida brings a tour group to God’s Acre, an 18th-century Moravian cemetery. Moravians, she says, believe that whatever our status in life, “we are all the same in death,” and that when you die, you should not be buried with your family, but “in the order in which you died.” If you bring humility to the contemplation of death, as the Moravians have done in burial practices, you recognize it as the great leveler. It doesn’t matter if we’re buried in a lavish crypt or in a mass grave; we still turn to dust. If we are remembered at all, it’s for the good or bad that we did. The older we get, the more time we spend doing mental math, hoping that the good outweighs the bad in the eyes of those we leave behind.
