The family melodrama “A Little Prayer,” written and directed with clumsy solemnity by Angus Maclachlan, follows Bill (David Strathairn), a Vietnam veteran hoping to insulate his daughter-in-law, Tammy (Jane Levy), from her husband’s affair at the office. It is a humble, almost hermetic story, with Bill and his son, David (Will Pullen), not only working at the same company and carousing at the same Veterans of Foreign Wars canteen, but also inhabiting the same home alongside their long-suffering wives.
The majority of “A Little Prayer” consists of charged domestic moments within the shared dwelling. Family members sip coffee in the kitchen, snap at each other in the den or fret over the future before bed. Maclachlan’s principal cast embody their ordinary-people roles with drawling accents and sporadic histrionics, and the film only occasionally achieves the feeling of an authentic regional representation. Even the ever-measured David Strathairn, a national treasure, struggles to carry the film’s weight.
As dysfunction bleeds into the mundanity, Maclachlan and his cinematographer Scott Miller rarely reach for creative camerawork, instead favoring long, static takes, occasionally broken up by cuts to other, barely-modified long, static takes. But a moving scene in a physician’s office, in which the camera orbits Tammy’s tear-stained face as she makes a tough decision, proves that this is a filmmaker able to wrest real feeling from his actors, and from his audience.
A Little Prayer
Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters.
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