Classic Wenders story

by RICHARD JONES

DIRECTOR Wim Wenders has had a long-standing love for the American heartland and its isolated towns, two aspects of film-making which shine through in Don't Come Knocking.

Central character Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) was once a feted Western movies actor, but in Wenders' film he's now 60 and has just a few too many addictions.

As the film opens we meet Howard in crisis, not long after he's walked off his current B-grade movie set to start his drive across a craggy, desolate landscape.

The film's financiers are desperate to get their star back so they send a sort of bounty hunter named Sutter (Tim Roth) in pursuit to bring him back and fulfil his contract.

Unaware of this development, Howard decides to visit his mother (Eva Marie Saint) in Elko, Nevada. It's the first time in 30 years he's been bothered to renew contact with his mother and discovers to his surprise that he's a father.

The bounty hunter tracks him down in Nevada, but now Howard has a sense of mission.

He eludes Sutter and continues his odyssey to Butte, Montana, one of Wenders' favourite locations. (It has to be remembered that in 1900 Butte had a population of 120,000 people and was bigger than both Los Angeles and San Francisco.)

In Butte, Howard discovers that it was through a brief fling with waitress Doreen (Shepard's real-life wife Jessica Lange) on a film shoot 20 years earlier that Doreen had become pregnant. Keen to give his life some meaning, the fading Western movies star feels that his son Earl (Gabriel Mann) could provide him with renewed zest.

Naturally, things don't quite work out the way Howard had hoped they might. Now 19 and a musician, Earl is a surly youth whose relationship with his girlfriend is very volatile.

To complicate matters, Howard meets Sky (Sarah Polley) who could be his daughter from another relationship two decades earlier.

This is a classic story of a journey back into a character's past. The panoramic and empty American landscape though which Howard travels is populated by individuals similar to himself. They, too, have been scarred by a whole range of emotions and circumstances.

19 September 2006

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