Review: Don’t Come Knocking

The film only longs for hard, distant men and comforting, unreflective women.

Don’t Come Knocking
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

More than 20 years ago, Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard made a near-great film, Paris, Texas, and a lot of its quality came from the central performance of Harry Dean Stanton. In Don’t Come Knocking, the second collaboration between Wenders and Shepard, the latter plays the lead himself. He’s still a very handsome, striking man, but emotionally he’s blocked. That’s what the story of the film is really about, but Shepard can’t play repression as an actor, as he’s unable to make his character’s plight moving or convincing.

Shepard’s Howard Spence is supposed to be a hard-living cowboy star on the skids, yet what movie star from the ’70s onward ever made a career out of westerns? When Howard bolts the set of his latest film, he calls his mother (Eva Marie Saint), a woman he hasn’t seen or spoken to in 30 years, and she simply welcomes him back home without any fuss at all. After three decades, all she can manage is a “What was your trouble, son?” attitude. She also provides some handy plot exposition, as he has a child he didn’t know about. Saint doesn’t seem to know how to play her role, but who can blame her? This isn’t meant to be a realistic film, but its succession of improbabilities feels lazy rather than intuitive.

Howard tracks down Doreen (Jessica Lange), a waitress who had his son. Lange grounds the film in her first few scenes with a palpable sense of wariness and absentminded regret, and Shepard’s performance improves when he’s with her. But Lange can never resist a pyrotechnical display of emotion for its own sake. In her big scene with Howard, where she tells him off, Lange is so chaotic and over the top, laughing, howling, sneering, and weeping all at once, that Wenders keeps cutting away from her, as if he’s embarrassed. The film, which had steadily improved with her first appearance, never recovers. As a director, Wenders tries hard to imbue this piece with mood and substance, and he enjoys shooting the lonely streets of Butte, Montana in nicely balanced widescreen compositions, but Shepard’s screenplay defeats him.

Advertisement

This is just another male menopause movie, marred by unlikely dialogue and hokey theatrical symbolism. Shepard’s Howard, the debauched movie star, worries that he isn’t the man his father was, and has the suspicion that acting in front of a camera isn’t manly; it isn’t authentic, and it’s left him without roots. Shepard’s concerns are from a different age, and they weren’t all that interesting 60 years ago. The other side of the story is dishonest: Instead of stardom, drugs, and unlimited sex, all Howard really wants is a Home. This is the vagrant dream of a self-pitying drunk, a passing fancy, and not worthy of a film. As a writer, Shepard seems to have lost touch with his real talent. Though his themes are still present in his recent work, they seem half-hearted, drained of all energy. His preoccupations had a unique tension and coiled sexuality on stage, but on film all that’s left is pretension and vague longings for hard, distant men and comforting, unreflective women.

Score: 
 Cast: Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth, Sarah Polley, Eva Marie Saint, Gabriel Mann, George Kennedy, Fairuza Balk  Director: Wim Wenders  Screenwriter: Sam Shepard  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 111 min  Rating: R  Year: 2005  Buy: Video

Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan’s books include The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock , Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, and Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave. He has written about film for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Nylon, The Village Voice, and more.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.