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Film review
Indie Flicks: As the skeletons rattle
By STEVE PERSALL
Published June 1, 2006
Don't Come Knocking (R) (110 min.) - Blend equal parts of The Electric Horseman with Broken Flowers and you have Wim Wenders' movie, although watching either of the former films would be a better use of time. Wenders is reunited with screenwriter Sam Shepard for something like a companion piece to their 1984 film Paris, Texas, in which an enigmatic man struggles to connect with a son he never knew, another link to another movie that exceeds this one. Shepard also stars as Howard Spence, a burned-out cowboy movie star who suddenly leaves his latest project, which is filming in the desert, and rides on horseback from tainted celebrity as fast as he can. Howard's career has been under the influence of drugs, alcohol and scandal. Now he's trying to go straight by doing penance for an incomplete chapter of his past, an illegitimate son he has never met. Sound familiar? Rattling old skeletons is a theme Shepard regularly explores in his plays and screen adaptations, so the flinty dialogue and revelations here aren't fresh. Neither is his laconic portrayal, relying on the less-is-more theory that could have made him a major movie star if he cared about such things. Don't Come Knocking contains a fair share of admirable qualities - badlands vistas and casino glitz filmed by Franz Lustig, and a strong performance by Jessica Lange as the mother of Howard's illegitimate son and Eva Marie Saint as Howard's too-patient mother. But the film is as aimless as Howard's personal life, unsure of whether it wants to be an indictment of Hollywood, a domestic drama or some kind of existential soap opera. None of those possibilities ripens. Shepard's screenplay keeps piling up angles of Howard's misery, too many for Wenders to corral. One illegitimate child would be enough to worry about, yet Sarah Polley wanders in and out of the picture as possibly another, carrying her mother's ashes and faint proof that Howard is her father. A private detective named Sutter (Tim Roth) keeps closing in, like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, but there's scant tension to the pursuit or capture. Don't Come Knocking is almost comedy, almost tragedy and nothing close to entertainment or enlightenment. C-
[Last modified June 23, 2006, 10:15:44]
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Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
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