Henry Poole (Luke Wilson) doesn’t buy his neighbor’s religious declarations. Actually, he can’t stand her entire system of beliefs or the way she keeps injecting the word of God into his perfectly apathetic, atheistic lifestyle. When she tries to persuade him to come around to her way of thinking, she crosses that line from nag to nut, and he lashes out, offended by her presumed naïveté.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, in a story that considers itself something of a bridge-builder between the doubters and the devout. But it stumbles to the finish line because it insists on streamlining every character into one of the two camps. It would be easy for a foreign audience watching “Henry Poole Is Here” to assume that America is composed solely of preachers and secularists, two camps all but unable to have civil conversations with each other. Maybe this is true in some communities across this country — and perhaps that’s the polarized state of the nation that is painted by so many cable-news commentators — but for the majority of Americans, this is a film that will have no bearing on reality. If they lived across the street from Henry, he wouldn’t be the intriguing outsider but the rude new guy who had the temerity to mock the beliefs of another. He’s a jerk of a hero, but more on that later.

From scene one, Henry seems angry at the world and everyone in it, and we get the hint pretty quickly that he might be thinking about checking out. Overpaying for a new house with no furniture in it, he chugs alcohol and eats frozen pizza and seems to be counting down the days. His cheery next-door neighbor, the elderly Esperanza (Adriana Barraz) stops by with a hot plate of tamales, and Henry patiently wades through polite chitchat as a thank-you for the free grub. But when she returns the next day, Henry confronts her outside the house, demanding to know why she was praying in his yard. Esperanza pleads with him and gestures toward the wall: “Don’t you see?”

Henry can’t see it, but Esperanza is convinced: The face of God has appeared on the side of Henry’s house, the result of some stucco repairs. She sees God; Henry sees a blotch, and, in not-so-subtle fashion, “Henry Poole Is Here” veers away from a compelling character study of a suicidal misanthrope and settles on a stalemate on the issue of religion. At issue is not so much God as the belief in God, and Henry’s inability to see the distinction. What seems to most intrigue screenwriter Albert Torres and director Mark Pellington is the notion of faith, and how belief — even in something nonexistent — can exert a positive influence on the believers. It channels their energy, broadens their horizons, encourages them to act with a higher judge in mind.

Alas, the heady, hypothetical debate quickly dissolves in a trickle of blood. As Henry dismisses this whole thing as hokum, saying as much to Esperanza’s minister, who visits the house to confirm the “miracle,” the blotch on the wall starts bleeding, and Henry cannot manage to wash it away. Not long after, the mute girl next door, Millie (Morgan Lily), utters her first words in years. Now it’s clear what the makers of the film believe: God did, indeed, stucco Henry’s house. Now Henry knows he needs help.

As if such a plea would serve as a meaningful act of character development. Everyone in “Henry Poole Is Here” has an agenda: Henry wants to be healed; Esperanza wants to be reassured about the death of a loved one, and Millie’s mother, Dawn (Radha Mitchell) — well, someone has to be the love interest.

With so much self-regard on display, it’s hard to see Henry’s religious conversion as anything less than a sellout — a safe bet laid by a guy with nothing to lose. It doesn’t help that Mr. Wilson fails to give Henry the emotional range of a man questioning his primal beliefs. Always squinting and always speaking in a half-whisper, Henry is a man of a single emotional state.

Much will probably be made about “Henry Poole Is Here” as a righteous work, but there’s little evidence that finding God will make Henry a better man. He isn’t on a spiritual quest, and he doesn’t find God because he wants to be a better person. When he reaches out to the great unknown in the film’s most emotional scene, it isn’t an act of faith so much as one of profiteering. He has built his own church of conditional belief.

ssnyder@nysun.com