His life in shambles, despondent Henry Poole (Luke Wilson) buys a house in the same suburban Los Angeles neighborhood where he somewhat unhappily grew up. One of his new neighbors, the slightly nosy but well-meaning Esperanza (Babel‘s Adriana Barraza), happens upon a stain on his newly painted, outdoor stucco wall that she believes is the face of Christ, and imbued with special powers. Henry wants nothing to do with the silliness, but more interactions with those around him — including divorcée Dawn (Radha Mitchell), whose eight-year-old daughter has stopped speaking since her parents’ break-up — slowly draw him out of his insular shell.

A filmmaker with a deep music video catalogue (including Pearl Jam’s groundbreaking “Jeremy” clip), director Mark Pellington has always been a master of atmosphere and mood, most notably in The Mothman Prophecies. In Henry Poole Is Here, though, he rolls the dice on a much more personal story, and succeeds in crafting what is overall an affecting movie about emotional waywardness and quiet reflection. The target is smaller, but Pellington’s extraordinary skill at marrying artful image and emotional content help Henry Poole avoid a lot of treacly downward drag, and elevate the emotional punch of debut screenwriter Albert Torres’ script, which is enough of a blank canvas to allow one to project onto it their own feelings of forlornness. The only nagging demerit? There’s a plummy, surface quality to Wilson’s moroseness and sullenness; one thinks about the deeper reservoirs of swallowed sadness that someone like Ryan Gosling could have conveyed with this role, and how those extra pangs of despair would have provided an even greater catharsis. To visit the movie’s official site, click here. (Overture, PG, 100 minutes)