Late in Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer, as army veteran Bill (David Strathairn) and his daughter-in-law Tammy (Jane Levy) visit an art gallery in their hometown of Winston-Salem, they appraise an oil painting by the 19th-century American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. “The infinite botanical detail, the terrifying depths of the valleys, and the overwhelming sense of unlimited space in the open panorama,” Tammy reads from the painting’s description, “combine to communicate a powerful sense of the sublime.” As Scott Miller’s camera glides over the composite vistas that comprise The Andes of Ecuador, something springs forth, ineffable, from the image. The staggering scenes of nature Bill and Tammy behold are a far cry from their quiet, suburban lives, but Church’s vision of pastoral grace — hued with the piercing glow of the sun — squares remarkably with their modest own.
Such grace, realized in communion between the Luminist painting and its contemporary observers, practically permeates the contained world of MacLachlan’s restrained but revelatory third feature. Having penned the screenplay for Phil Morrison’s prominent indie Junebug (2005) and helmed the understated dramas Goodbye to All That (2014) and Abundant Acreage Available (2017), MacLachlan has developed an eye for the unspoken: where such cues often remain undramatized onscreen, they vividly foreground the workings of the stage, and A Little Prayer draws liberally from this latter tradition, though eschewing the playwriting histrionics of Florian Zeller for a finer approximation of private familial turmoil. Its hand-wrought, homespun narrative places Bill, the patriarch of a quaint and unassuming household, at its center when, over the course of a few uneasy weeks, he comes to wrestle with the burdens of his legacy.
At the sheet-metal company which he owns, Bill catches glimpses of his son, David (Will Pullen), flirting with his assistant Narcedalia (Dascha Polanco). “You know you can’t do that these days,” he counsels the younger man, hesitant to label this an overt case of infidelity but also cognizant, in part, of the generational rifts that have come to redefine the bond between father and son. Both men have been to war, but while David’s PTSD is clearly etched on his person and his fraying relationship with Tammy, Bill’s conflicting psyche is harder to parse. Speaking to his fellow veterans, he allows the tiniest reminiscence of their struggles; at home, with his wife Venida (Celia Weston), the deeper woes go unacknowledged. While Bill observes David’s unabated affair, still unbeknownst to Tammy, Venida witnesses Tammy’s struggles more acutely, and when David’s younger sister Patti (Anna Camp) crashes their couch to evade her drug-addict husband, not for the first time, both parents find themselves saddled with quiet regret, yet helpless to right the wrongs of their adult children.
But as much as MacLachlan turns inward to observe this rustic North Carolinian family, he does not come upon the embittered and implosive register of the modern melodrama. Instead, A Little Prayer evokes a religiosity that arguably comes to life in the very act of seeing. A model of old-school decency but not unabashedly liberal, Bill (and perhaps the kindred Tammy) has the weariness to view the world not as a minefield of irresolvable political difference, but as a deeply personal, deeply intentional state of care and being. With majestic yet measured performances by both Strathairn and Levy, the film elevates the quotidian experiences of an older, more worldly generation, its whispered transcendence enlivening without pitying the flesh and blood of its characters. And though a minimalist streak colors its proceedings, A Little Prayer is no simple paean. Its littleness in prayer belies an immensity in answer: as Tammy queries Bill on the meaning of “panorama,” to which he replies with “the whole picture, how far you can see,” MacLachlan cuts to a shot of her gazing not at the painting but, ever so admiringly, at her father-in-law. Even as Bill stares wistfully at the painterly visage, uncertain of his own image, the sublime has found her and her him.
DIRECTOR: Angus MacLachlan; CAST: Jane Levy, David Strathairn, Will Pullen, Anna Camp; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN THEATERS: August 29; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
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