Wim Wender's Don't Come Knocking sneaks up on you slowly. Wenders, returning to the American desert twenty years after Paris, Texas, has a made a quiet, wonderful movie. Sam Shepard's screenplay is funny but not hilarious, moving but not exactly tear-jerking: an intriguing story that is in no hurry to get anywhere. Shepard (who also wrote the screenplay for Paris, Texas but refused to play the leading role that went to Harry Dean Stanton) gives a rich, craggy performance as Howard Spence, an aging Western movie star who walks out the set of his latest B picture, ostensibly in order to find himself.
Turns out, there is a motley crew out in the world who have been half-heartedly looking for him: his elderly mother (the marvelous Eva Marie Saint), his long forgotten lover Doreen (Jessica Lange), a couple of grown-up children he never knew he had (Sarah Polley and Gabriel Mann), and a surprisingly emphatic bounty hunter (Tim Roth) who has been hired to track Howard down and get him back on the movie set. As a bonus, we also get Fairuza Balk, who does an inspired dance on a couch.
All of the characters are eccentric in their own right, but never cloyingly so. Polley, who, for most of the film, clutches the urn that contains her dead mother's ashes, is particularly wonderful. Surprisingly, she becomes the emotional center of the film, confidently issuing commands to an uncertain father and an angry and confused half-brother.
Don't Come Knocking is similar to Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers in obvious ways. An aging lothario (Bill Murray plays the equivalent role in Flowers) goes on an unexpected journey through the American heartland to find a son, encountering former lovers en route, and discovers hard truths about himself in the process. Coincidentally, Shepard and Murray also share Jessica Lange in their sexual history. Same movie? Not really. Lange, for instance, is remarkably different: an upscale animal psychic in Broken Flowers versus an earthy waitress and mother in Don't Come Knocking. In both films, she exudes a strength of character absent in her old lover. The women are competent, assured, able to fill holes in their lives all on their own. It's the men who are lost; rediscovered children offer unearned hope. With heart and soul, Shepard and Wenders take us on the more satisfying journey.
