"A Thousand Years of Good Prayers"

In the opening scene of director Wayne Wang’s new film “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” suitcase after suitcase slides slowly down an airport conveyer belt in a methodical, mundane rhythm. The scene’s sparse style illuminates the beauty and bleakness of everyday life. And while Wang’s film, which quietly examines a strained father-daughter relationship, is no plot-thriller, it does lull the audience into a peaceful state with its calming, metrical scenes and restrained, spare dialogue.

“A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” follows a Chinese father, Mr. Shi (played by Henry O), who moves to America to help his grown daughter, Yilan, cope with a recent divorce. But Yilan, played by Feihong Yu, chafes under her father’s constant gaze. She resents his imposition and practice of the Chinese traditions that she has kept out of her apartment.

Mr. Shi, fresh off the airplane, steps into a world unaffected by 9/11, where everyone he meets is friendly, kind, and eager to make conversation with a foreigner. Never is he met with a racist remark or uncharitable gesture. In fact, the only unkind words come from his own daughter. The man the audience meets is not the austere, reserved father who never talked about family problems that Yilan remembers from her childhood. Nor is he the stereotypical Asian father who comes from a patriarchal society and seldom cooks his own food. Rather, Mr. Shi cooks extravagant meals and is continually trying to get his daughter to talk about what went wrong with her marriage and what plans she has for the future.

Rather than centering on clichéd cultural conflicts, the movie focuses on Mr. Shi as he copes with generational differences. He soon becomes friends with an elderly woman from Iran whom he meets on daily visits to a park. “Madam,” as he calls her, speaks English as well—or, rather, as poorly—as he does, and the pair communicates through broken English, gestures, and their native languages. They form a close bond and anxiously wait each morning for their daily conversations.

But when their children step in, the two find that their lives and their friendship are not entirely under their control. In Mr. Shi’s case, his daughter has run out of tolerance and booked him a ticket for a cross-country bus tour without his counsel or consent. In Madam’s case, her children hastily ship her off to a nursing home. In each instance, the central conflict is ageism, not racism.

Half of the film is taken up by Mr. Shi trying to talk to his daughter, sometimes in English, other times in Chinese, but always painstakingly slow. It’s ironic that Mr. Shi spends most his time trying to get his daughter to talk, because the best scenes in the film occur when nobody is talking. They usually involve Mr. Shi puttering around the house—hanging up good luck charms, reading the newspaper, and rummaging through his daughter’s room. Wang loves to show Mr. Shi’s heartbreaking vulnerability and fragility. In one scene, Mr. Shi, shirtless and frail, methodically straps a harness onto his back,and slowly pulls the cords to help him keep his curved, osteoporotic spine a little straighter. Most of these scenes are just short flashes of his day-to-day routines, but their telling nature makes the slow, drawn-out dinner conversations between father and daughter bearable.

Wang’s film is neither extraordinary nor groundbreaking, but it certainly is enjoyable. Both Mr. Wang and Mr. Shi have tried to demonstrate the need for talking, but the audience leaves with the feeling that sometimes life’s most beautiful moments come when people don’t say a word.