‘A Little Prayer’ Review: Angus MacLachlan’s Family Drama Takes Us There (to North Carolina)

A relative once described North Carolina as “a valley of humility between two mountains of pride in Virginia and South Carolina.” I found that to be the case while attending college in Winston-Salem, which is also the hometown of writer-director Angus MacLachlan as well as the setting for many of his films. The latest of these, A Little Prayer, provides the clearest illustration of how places imprint themselves upon us and guide our actions.

In MacLachlan’s film, a tight-knit family in the Tar Heel state must question what it means to remain committed to their spouses and children. But in a rarity for Southern-set cinema, he’s uninterested in indicting a culture. A Little Prayer plays out like a morality play in the mold of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, where MacLachlan feels similarly liberated not to have to explain or justify the milieu. For the two main male characters of this film, being a veteran carries the same weight of expectations as an artist would in New York, with those around them having an unspoken understanding of how they will act in certain ways.

The multi-generation Brass family leads a quiet existence devoted to work and community. The family’s sturdy patriarch, Bill (David Strathairn), runs a local business in partnership with his son, David (Will Pullen). They share space elsewhere, too, as Bill and his wife, Venida (Celia Weston), keep their son and daughter-in-law, Tammy (Jane Levy), under their roof.

MacLachlan wastes little time establishing that conflict isn’t something this group actively seeks out. In unguarded moments when exasperation finally gets the better of these soft-spoken characters, they express bewilderment at how the world seems to spin out of their control. Be it something as small as household duties or as large as the impacts of the opioid crisis in their community, they favor persevering through their pain and frustration over confronting it. The film patiently reveals how it takes all the more forceful of an intervention to make them vocalize their discontent because their secrets and feelings are held even tighter than most.

A Little Prayer delivers a double dose of such jolts to the delicate Brass family ecosystem. The first arrives in the form of Bill and Venida’s daughter, Patti (Anna Camp), who adds additional strain on their packed dwelling by moving back in following the dissolution of her marriage. This character feels mostly like a plot device to demonstrate how Tammy has become more a part of the Brass clan than an actual branch on the family tree does. Not helping matters is Camp’s over-the-top accent work, which goes far beyond what might be necessary to cement her character’s status as the black sheep of the bunch.

But the more profound disruption that rattles the Brass family’s very foundation is Bill’s discovery of David’s affair with his colleague, Narcedalia (Dascha Polanco), amid his and Tammy’s fertility struggles. It’s in this story arc that MacLachlan finds the richest material by questioning who gets to have the final word about the responsibility for children within a community. The competing visions that emerge of what people owe each other in parenting rattle Bill’s self-righteous sense of clarity for how to protect his family.

Bill ultimately arrives at the position from which MacLachlan always operates in A Little Prayer: These complex choices exist outside simple binaries. While the narrative intersects with various sensitive cultural issues, MacLachlan never tries to turn the characters’ journey into a statement. The naturally unfolding rhythms of the story are true to their experience. There’s nothing inherently political about their lives; it’s just life to them.

Even as the characters’ personal moral codes create friction with the ethical framework governing the changing world around them, the film’s grace and gentility always shine through—especially with Bill and his kindred spirit, Tammy. In tandem with the characters, the audience realizes that even small choices carry tremendous consequences. To share in the wellspring of empathy to which MacLachlan offers access in A Little Prayer is to care about the decisions facing people like the Brass family beyond what box they check on their ballots.