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Friday, March 24, 2006
'Don't Come Knocking' offers only minor pleasures
Twenty years after collaborating on the magnificent "Paris, Texas," director Wim Wenders and screenwriter Sam Shepard revisit the themes in the context of a meandering modern western, this time with Shepard himself in the saddle.
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View all photosThe script demands plenty of willing suspension of disbelief. Shepard's Howard Spence is supposed to be a modern cowboy movie star whose affairs and drunken antics have made him notorious tabloid fodder, in an era when the very idea of a western superstar making big budget Louis L'Amour-esque oaters is quaint at best.
The plot hinges on the fact that he hasn't called his forgiving and accommodating mother (Eva Marie Saint) in decades, let alone visited her. Otherwise, he'd already know that he has a son, the offspring of a movie-set romance with a small-town extra decades ago.
As an actor, Shepard's restrained, internalized performance meshes nicely with Wenders' loping pace and his natural screen presence lends itself to Wenders' love of observing characters in landscapes -- both those in which they belong (the magnificent desert landscapes surrounding Moab, Utah) and those in which they try to belong (the small town east of Butte, Mont.). They are among the best moments of the film.
The rest of the cast flies out of control, from the overwrought tantrums and childish rampages of Gabriel Mann to the self-consciously enigmatic turn by Sarah Polley to the actor's studio playfulness of Jessica Lange.
If "Paris, Texas" is an epic folk ballad about primal family themes and lost in the wasteland masculinity trying to find its way home, "Don't Come Knocking" plays more like a meandering country-and-western pop tune that sings its lyrics with a chagrined contrition and a crooked smile. For all of its minor pleasures, this encore lacks the depth of its conviction.
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