Big skies, broken hearts

Wenders and Shepard revisit Paris, Texas by way of Butte, Montana

By Cheryl Eddy

>cheryl@sfbg.com

In the not-so-Wild West, where assistant directors on Segways roam, washed-up matinee idol Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) gallops right off the set of his latest picture, appropriately dubbed Phantom of the West. Where Howard's headed at the start of Don't Come Knocking — directed by Wim Wenders and scripted by Shepard — is unclear, but it echoes the dusty road from regret to redemption trod by Harry Dean Stanton in the previous Wenders-Shepard collaboration, 1984's Paris, Texas.

Before a recent San Francisco screening of Knocking, director Wenders explained he'd been trying to get Shepard in front of his camera for decades. It wasn't meant to be for Paris, Texas, the story of an emotionally desiccated man who reconnects with his son and wife after a troubled parting. But the casting finally fit for Knocking, which follows Howard's journey back to Butte, Mont., a place where more than memories linger from his breakout film, Just Like Jesse James (apologies to Cher, I presume). Wenders called Knocking his love letter to Butte, which he frames as a poetically fading town stuffed with cinematic vistas and Western protokitsch.

Like Stanton's Travis, who views Paris, Texas, as a place where his stomped-out dreams might still be realized, Howard considers Butte with a smidgen of hope. Knocking's most forced conceit is that Howard is a movie star — albeit an aging one, and the subject of many tabloid articles about his drunken misdeeds (in Knocking's universe, there's still some demand for earnest horse operas). The disconnect between Howard's movie-set West and the "real" West enables Wenders's affection for visual contrast, as when a helicopter thunders through Monument Valley or when casino lights glare through the front window of a homey cottage occupied by Howard's mother (Eva Marie Saint), whom he visits for the first time in 30 years after bolting from Phantom of the West.

"How'd you get to be such a mess?" his mother asks, because he is one. After she informs him that he fathered a son during his rakish younger years, Howard shuffles up to Butte in search of his long-lost kin — sort of a cross between Bill Murray in Broken Flowers and Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies. On the trail of this phantom is the stuffy Sutter (Tim Roth), hired by the film studio's insurance company to retrieve their contract-breaking leading man.

Languid, yet often driven by shouty confrontations, Knocking worries more about Shepard's characters and Wenders's imagery (not to mention T. Bone Burnett's music) than about filling in a story where much is implied but rarely explained. In Butte waitress Doreen (Jessica Lange) greets her ex-fling with a grimace; their son, a mopey alt-country crooner named Earl (Gabriel Mann) doesn't greet him at all. Further complications arise with the appearance of Sky (Sarah Polley), a serene blond clutching an urn. She also has ties to Howard — turns out he got around quite a bit during his Jesse James era.

The beauty of Don't Come Knocking is in its offhand moments. After a bitter argument between Howard and Earl, the bright sun darts behind a cloud, darkening the entire street faster than an eclipse. According to Wenders, the shot was not a lighting trick but pure atmospheric luck. Knocking's themes break no new ground for the film's principal architects; not for nothing is there a book titled A Body Across the Map: The Father-Son Plays of Sam Shepard. But there's no denying the creative joy inherent in this Wenders-Shepard collaboration — it's all up there onscreen in the finished product, an occasionally sublime exploration of one man's final frontier. *

DON'T COME KNOCKING

Opens Fri/24 in Bay Area Theaters

For showtimes go to www.sfbg.com.

www.wim-wenders.com

www.dontcomeknocking.com>