More than two decades down the road from their Paris, Texas collaboration, director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard reunite for this sporadically interesting but mostly unfocused and vaguely pretentious rehash of many of that earlier film's meatier ideas.
Shepard himself takes on the principal role here as Howard Spence, a burnt-out star of oddly anachronistic cowboy movies, who bolts from the set one day and takes to the open road, first by pony and then by vintage Olds. This gives Wenders the opportunity to fill the screen with sweeping images of the American landscape, cultural ephemera and enigmatic roots music, a combination of sights and sounds slapped together with the obvious intention of evoking something bigger than the sum of its parts. Spence returns to his dimly remembered hometown, old lovers re-emerge (Jessica Lange displaying some disastrous cosmetic surgery) and the children-he-never-knew-he-had (Sarah Polley and Gabriel Mann) crawl out of the woodwork. But the characters rarely connect with our emotions or with our imaginations. The film meanders along like a beautifully photographed but less intriguing Broken Flowers, as Shepard's aging, enigmatic father takes his journey through the past in an effort to pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, the characters in Don't Come Knocking engage in behavior that's alternately inscrutable, hysterical or fatally laconic to the point that the movie becomes difficult to take all that seriously. Wenders and Shepard don't seem at all sure whether to aim their project at our heads or our hearts or simply somewhere past the moons of Neptune. Stars Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Sarah Polley, Tim Roth, Eva Marie Saint and Gabriel Mann.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2006.