May the nearly perfect drama ‘A Little Prayer’ find its audience

“A Little Prayer” — 4 stars

Angus MacLachlan’s “A Little Prayer” made its first appearance at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, and those of us who cherished it there were worried it might never see the light of day again. A small-scale, nearly perfect drama of small-town American lives, the film draws you in the way a well-written novel does, and the character at its center is a flawed, decent, troubled man — an ordinary hero rather than the super kind. It’s an exemplar of the good little movie that doesn’t sell, and for two years it was stuck in distribution limbo. Yet here it is at last, and all I can say is: Go.

If you need further enticement, know that David Strathairn plays that decent, troubled man, a soft-spoken North Carolina patriarch helplessly watching his family come apart. The actor is one of the secret glories of the past half-century of American film, and for some of a certain age and disposition, he’s a quietly potent sex symbol. A valued character actor now in his 70s, Strathairn gets the occasional lead, like his turn as Edward R. Murrow in 2005’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.” But the role of Bill Brass, a Vietnam veteran and local businessman in the Winston-Salem area, seems tailored to his taciturn strengths.

On the surface, Bill has a fine, average life: a loving wife of decades, Venida (Celia Weston); a son, David (Will Pullen), who has followed him into the family sheet metal company; a home with the mortgage paid off; and a fresh-faced daughter-in-law, Tammy (Jane Levy), who lives with David in a cottage out back. But “A Little Prayer” acknowledges that average lives have their common darkness, too, and early in the film, Bill becomes aware that his son is having an affair with the company receptionist (Dascha Polanco of “Orange Is the New Black”).

The wrongness of the infidelity eats at the father, and when Bill tries to lecture his son and gets firmly set back on his heels, you can feel the edges of his safe little world start to crumble. At around this time, Bill and Venida’s other child, Patti (Anna Camp of “Pitch Perfect”), arrives back home with her little daughter, Hadley (Billie Roy), having left an abusive husband to deal with his opioid addiction. Exuberant, irresponsible, a lousy mom and a championship cusser, she’s the family rebel without much to show for it, a prodigal daughter who knows she can stretch her father’s patience thin but never his love.

So “A Little Prayer” is about the sober truth that children never turn out the way a parent expects or even hopes, and also that they take more from us than we care to admit. At the movie’s beating heart is the relationship between Bill and Tammy, both of them kind, careful people, appreciative of small moments of grace while aware that behind any well-ordered life lies chaos. Levy (she played the title character in TV’s “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist”) arrives in this movie like a newly cut cornflower: Tammy comes from Kentucky poverty and feels both thankful to have what she has — a husband, a roof over her head — and cursed to know that it’s fleeting.

MacLachlan is a North Carolina native and comes by his observations honestly; he’s best known for writing the script for “Junebug” (2005), the indie hit that launched the career of Amy Adams, but he has written and directed a handful of regionally shot films, of which “A Little Prayer” is the strongest. “Junebug,” while extravagantly praised, was a young man’s movie with its share of pretensions, while the new film sees the world with the tempered gravitas that comes with age. MacLachlan likes people, and he writes the kind of characters an actor like Strathairn or Weston (who’s delightfully petty here) can bite into. Everyone has their say in “Prayer,” including the other woman played by Polanco, who gets a monologue late in the movie that immeasurably deepens what we think of her.

Likewise, “A Little Prayer” leads Bill Brass and us slowly into the deep end until he and we realize we’re in over our heads. It’s a film that meditates on the mystery of other people, and it’s wise enough to not come to any conclusions. The rich, strong voice of an unknown woman singing gospel hymns floats over the neighborhood in the early scenes, and we never do find out where it’s coming from. Similarly, both Bill and David are veterans but of different conflicts, Vietnam for the father and Iraq for the son. The commonalities bind them and the differences make them strangers to each other, and we’re invited, without fanfare, to consider what America’s wars have done to its people.

There’s much to love about “A Simple Prayer,” including the deft touch of the filmmaking: a scene of Tammy in a doctor’s office, the camera subtly swinging around her in close-up as sorrow rises to the surface, or the way MacLachlan moves in close to an epic Frederic Church landscape painting at a local museum, its Eden-like panorama a promise to a man like Bill and a bitter joke. What you may come away with, more than anything else, is abiding respect for the two people at the movie’s core, an old man and a young woman whose love for each other is nothing more or less than a recognition of the struggle to be good in a fallen world.

MacLachlan has spoken in interviews of his admiration for the films of Yasujiro Ozu, who along with Jean Renoir may be the most humane director in the history of the movies. Certainly the relationship between Bill and Tammy, so tender and compassionate, echoes that of the father and daughter in “Late Spring” (1949), perhaps the Japanese master’s greatest film. (Squint a little and Strathairn even looks like that movie’s Chishu Ryu.)

But all of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.

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In theaters. Rated R for salty language. 89 minutes.