ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

IT IS MORE than twenty years since Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders collaborated to such memorable effect on ‘Paris, Texas’. Expectations were high for their belated reunion on ‘Don’t Come Knocking’, but the film hardly seems the work of the same people.

The dialogue is stilted, the performances are awkward, and even some of the plot just doesn’t carry much conviction.

Shepard stars as Howard Spence, the star of the kind of westerns that everyone stopped making about forty years ago. That’s the first element of a story that often leaves you scratching your head in disbelief.

He walks off the set of his latest film suffering from some kind of existential crisis. A surfeit of women, booze and lurid tabloid headlines have finally taken their toll. He makes a rare visit to his mother Lulu (Eva Marie Saint), who informs him that he has a son he has never met.

Sensing that this could fill the void for him, he sets off to Butte, Indiana for a reunion with lost love Doreen (Jessica Lange) and a meeting with the son she bore him thirty years ago. ‘Don’t Come Knocking’ sounds promising enough on paper, but Shepard’s flinty, careworn Spence never really engages our sympathies.

His self-destructive behaviour and critical encounters don’t make us ache for the apparent emptiness in his soul. The film itself is more an uneven series of moments than a smooth flowing piece, with Gabriel Mann badly overplaying the role of the son, Earl.

It also beggars belief that he has never heard of Spence, given his tabloid notoriety and the fact that his mother’s diner is decorated with posters from his films. It’s just one more implausibility in a film that seems determined to shoot itself in the foot.

Selected nationwide release
Director: Wim Wenders
Stars: Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Sarah Polley, Gabriel Mann, Eva Marie Saint, Tim Roth, George Kennedy
Screenplay: Sam Shepard
Certificate: 15
Running time: 111 mins
Country: US/Germany
Year: 2005

© Allan Hunter, 2006