Sam Shepard, playing an ageing Western actor, sits on an abandoned couch on a dead end street awaiting his son’s return. The camera swishes 360 degrees around him as the sky darkens. And around. And around. Once an audacious directorial trademark, it feels like embarrassing self-parody. Or staring too long at a washing machine. It sounds churlish to criticise a filmmaker for doing pretty much the same things that made Wings Of Desire a modern classic, but there is just no getting around it. Herr Wenders’ tics – that floating feeling, dreamy time-lapse photography and wordy poeticism – simply haven’t coalesced into an entirely satisfactory feature since the late 80s.
Sadly, this latest film doesn’t break his duck. An absurdly anachronistic drama sees Sam Shephard’s horse opera star escape a bizarre contemporary Fordian shoot to visit his mother and search for a son he never knew existed. If you think this sounds suspiciously like Broken Flowers, you’re not wrong. Unlike the neat anti-plotting of the Jarmusch film, however, Don’t Come Knocking just bucks you off the steed and keeps going, while we’re left scratching our heads. It’s just too hard to buy into the unreality of Wenders’ arthouse universe anymore and without that suspension of disbelief, there are only questions.
Why does the son, once tracked down, become so weirdly hysterical? Why is his shrieking girlfriend essayed by Fairuza Balk, who, after two decades worth of similar harpy antics, looks like the oldest rock-chick this side of Debbie Harry. Why is Eva Marie Saint (playing Shephard’s mother) still dropping Vietnam into the conversation? Why is Tim Roth, the bondsman on Shephard’s tail, acting like one of the Nazis in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Why is Sarah Polley constantly bathed in an angelic white light? Is it allegory, commentary or mineral?
This isn’t ambiguity. It’s a muddle. Shame too, because there’s an endearing howdy charm about Don’t Come Knocking. The casting is, for the most part, pitch perfect. Predictably, Sam Shephard and Jessica Lange (co-starring as a former conquest) shine in parts that are simultaneously overwritten and underwritten.
Wenders, meanwhile, the Great American Tourist, retains his flair for lyrical Americana. His depictions of small-town casinos and red desert rock would melt even sworn enemies of the Great Satan. Still, in the era of the trailer-park western, when films like Brokeback Mountain and The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada are mercilessly seeking out the limitations of the system on horseback, this less qualified romanticism seems outmoded and displaced. Sure looks pretty, though…