Opening Day: 17 August 2006 (The Picturehouse)

Synopsis:

Once a big Western movie star, Howard (Sheperd) now drowns his disgust for his selfish and failed life with alcohol, drugs and young women. If he were to die now, nobody would shed a tear over him, that's the sad truth. Until one day Howard learns that he might have a child somewhere out there. The very idea seems like a ray of hope that his life wasn't all in vain. So he sets out to find that young man or woman. He discovers an entire life that he has missed.....

Movie Review:

Sam Shepard co-writes and stars in “Don’t Come Knocking”, where an aging Western star in a moment of alcohol-fueled realisation deserts the production of his latest film to search down his past in order find a new future. Howard Spence is the quintessential lone ranger, no place to call home and a drugstore cowboy at heart, dependent on booze and women to get him through his days. Blessed with a bevy of talented performers and a seasoned director/co-writer in Wim Wenders, the film doesn’t quite live up to the expectations set with Shepard and Wender’s last collaboration, “Paris, Texas”.

It’s very much the same sort of endeavour, but they’ve lost their edge and the understanding of the painful realisations of lost glory and rediscovered pasts, which they had carefully constructed back then. While the truth of their storytelling might be wavering by contemporary standards, the message does not change in their latest effort. Unfortunately, an over-wrought and glaringly miscalculated script hinders the potential that this film had.

Crafted with an awkward surrealism in the setting and its characters, Wenders puts together a effusively insincere and dreary account of an unsympathetic and constantly inebriated lothario who’s motivation is never quite clear to anyone, especially to himself. Bogged down with a screenplay reeking of self-awareness and a discomfited atmosphere of pretension, it’s a stale study of male menopausal midlife crisis punctuated with obligatory regrets and the exaggerated interpretations of its remnants.

Howard traverses through the desert and through trailer parks to reach his mother (Eva Saint Marie) to hide out from the insurance company tracer (Tim Roth) that is commissioned to bring him back and complete the production of his film. In Shepard’s version of this suspended reality where unnatural occurrences happen as if commonplace, his relentlessly cheerful (hints of alcoholism) mother, who hasn’t seen her son in over 30 years, bears no animosity or curiosity over her estranged son’s veritable abandonment. From here, he learns of a son that he never knew existed and sets off to Butte, Montana to seek him out. Here on out, there’s a very strong semblance to Bill Murray’s own portrayal of an aging lothario in search of a son in “Broken Flowers”. But while, he gives an ardent and minimalist performance in that role, Shepard’s Howard is loudmouthed and gauche with no redeeming qualities to root for.

The mother of this son, Doreen (Jessica Lange, who was also in “Broken Flowers”) does not welcome Howard back but instead gives an uncomfortable and undecided reception to him. He meets his son, Earl (Gabriel Mann), a Chris Isaak-esque crooner with Faizura Balk playing a role as his bizarre groupie-girlfriend that seems to be a composite of every character she has ever played. All while a peculiar girl named Sky (Sarah Polley) carries an urn with a mother’s ashes while following Howard around to confront him with an apparent mutual connection. Polley plays it with a demeanour so sweet and enigmatic but with a coy obliviousness that strangely enough, almost seems like she actually knows everybody’s story inside out. It’s definitely an interesting comparison to the overt self-denial that everyone around her appears to suffer from.

These characters are just means to an end. They are mere props to propel the story, but are given heavy and undue representations that are too heavy-handed for each of them to adequately pull off. With its multitude of pointless and meandering sequences to get to the main gist of the plot, I suppose it’s to its credit that it does not circle about the important revelations when it does approach them but it still does it with relative trepidation. It’s best served during its moments of quiet meditation. Especially in an effective scene involving a revolving camera and a reflective Howard sitting on a couch on the streets with the traffic passing by, which begins a welcome epiphany leading to its climax.

What’s left is a maudlin attempt to signify the emotional impotence that Howard and his film’s cadre laughably tries to portray throughout the film. Untrue characters and their reactions give the film a tainted look at the disintegration of family values and its consequent effects that the flawed atavistic ideals of the Old West cannot change.

Movie Rating:

(A picturesque bore with frustrating and clichéd characters that are unable to communicate the point of the film)

Review by Justin Deimen