As far as self-loathing, semi-allegorical, brooding revisionist Westerns go, the new Wim Wenders/Sam Shepard collaboration Don’t Come Knocking might represent the gold standard. It still has a ways to go before achieving any sort of dramatic harmony, or before establishing an identity singular enough to break away from the pair’s 1984 triumph Paris, Texas, and it occasionally shuffles along on a skinny horse named Incoherence. But there is a personal cinema here, and just when you think it belongs to no one you know, Wenders and Shepard sneak in to disassemble the myth with all the subtle force of a bronco.

Relax, recline, regret: Sam Sheaprd as Howard Spence in Don’t Come Knocking (Photos: Donata Wenders)
“When we had the character of Howard, we didn’t know what job he had,” Wenders told The Reeler during a recent vist to New York. “Sam suggested that he be a Western actor, and I was all opposed to idea. The last thing I wanted to do was a film that was a film inside a film. I didn’t like it. So he said, ‘Let me write it, because I know you will like it in the end, and I know I’m on the right track.’ So he wrote the first scene, and I read that the guy was running away from the movie set. I could live with that. It’s really not a film that deals with film itself.
But it broadens into the world of the Western, and as we’re writing the story, I realized the Western was really the only genre out there that deals with people who are trying to find where they belong. And that is exactly Howard’s struggle: He doesn’t know where he belongs, and he missed his life. And (with) all these Western heroes, there’s always the scene where they’re with the woman of their lives and they say, ‘I’m gonna come back,’ and they ride away, and you know they’re all wasting their lives. So I figured the Western was the real background of the film, even if it’s contemporary.”
And the inside joke does not end with a lost movie cowboy. Sure, Shepard’s aging Howard Spence flees his Utah movie set on horseback, and he lathers on the symbolism (and at least nominal self-reference) early when he trades his glimmering Hollywood wardrobe and muscular horse for the shabby “true west” get-up of a blitzed ranch hand he encounters in the desert. As the prodigal son, he roams to Elko, Nev., where he reunites with his mother (a mesmerizing Eva Marie Saint) and takes refuge from a fastidious bounty hunter (Tim Roth) charged with returning Howard to the production. But before long, Howard is the prodigal father, fleeing north to Butte, Mont., in his own father’s old Packard, poking around for a son he conceived while shooting his first film 30 years earlier.

His journey reacquaints him with Doreen (Jessica Lange), a career waitress who was his partner in that youthful fling but who now regards Howard as the anachronism in a place where time stood still. Butte is her ghost town; her café the film’s flatlining, Not-So-Wild West Saloon where sleepy locals indulge in poker and mysterious young Sky (Sarah Polley) observes Howard almost like an apparition. At a little more ribald watering hole–this one has live music–Doreen points out Howard’s son Earl (Gabriel Mann) singing onstage, proud of his talent but promising nothing in terms of his character.
Earl’s outrage at his father’s return sparks one of recent memory’s more irredeemably histrionic meltdowns, with Mann not just chewing scenery but chucking it from his second-story apartment to the street below. He wrings every last cliché of Shepardian theatricality from his tussles with Howard, prompting me to ask him how he worked to avoid painting himself into sort of a one-note corner. “I think if one is to watch closely in some of the performances,” Mann said, “or in that particular character, there’s a lot of vulnerability that’s behind the sort of stomping and yelling. And then finally , I think…”
Mann stops for the briefest of pauses, waves his finger at me and smiles. “I’ll bet you thought it was a little one-note, didn’t you, my friend?”
Just playing devil’s advocate.
“Well, you have to be,” Mann continued. “It’s a very slippery slope when you have to go to those places, but you kind of have no choice. And I just thought, ‘Well, it’s all motivated by pain,’ as Sam says it. It’s just fear and bravado. And there’s different ways he’s angry with his mother than he’s angry with his father than he’s annoyed with his girlfriend. And at the end of the day, I did what I did. And I felt like if there was sort of a consensus among Sam and Wim that it was good, then that was good enough for me. You know? That I was serving his words in a way that he felt satisfied. I mean, no one was going to know that better than Shepard.”

Sarah Polley attempts to chill out Gabriel Mann. It does not work.
Yeah, well, legend or not, Shepard has yet to obtain a lifetime exemption for the whiny earnestness as inherent to his work as his trenchant explorations of fathers and sons or existential crisis. Mann wrecks almost every scene he is in, leaving Wenders to exploit Polley as an idealized feminine analogue–Howard’s other, reverent child, the innocent one who shadows Howard while carting around an urn filled with her mother’s ashes. (In different ways, Howard and Earl also carry the knowledge of their own living mothers with them like a burden.) The director lavishes Polley with close-ups, and rightly so; her silent gaze is the most authentic expression Wenders has at his disposal for nearly two hours.
But again, the Western genre’s inauthenticity informs so much of Don’t Come Knocking that Wenders’s and Shepard’s restless formalism kind of works. An early establishing shot features trailers circled like wagons on the desert film set. Wenders jump-cuts from a day-for-night lens to blinding natural sunlight as the production implodes in Howard’s absence. The urban isolation of Edward Hopper creeps up in pastoral Butte. Roth’s quest to locate Howard digs at Hollywood’s efficiency rituals. As the man in black who storms through a swinging café door to wreack havoc, Earl is little more than a self-obsessed baby. In one fascinating sequence, Wenders toys with Howard’s rootlessness by planting him on a couch in the middle of the street for 24 hours and circling the furniture with his camera from sunset to sunrise.
“But just as much as we have an ironic distance to Howard,” Wenders said, “and as he really knew he was a failure, and that this freedom that he represented in his life was basically just a lack of responsibility, and that he was really not a grown up man, in the same way we sort of had a distance from the genre of the Western and looked at it with irony. … We had fun with the Western genre. And the guy who inherits Howard’s horse and his costume is stopped on the highway to show his papers. We didn’t really believe in the Western.”
That ethos helps Wenders and Shepard overcome whatever Don’t Come Knocking owes to their earlier, superior collaboration on Paris, Texas–the character of landscape, the paternal wanderer and Western anomie in particular. That it will not change the world is hardly a criticism; for a litle while, anyway, one can find at least some reward in the world it inhabits onscreen. Typical Wenders, I know–but even for non-fans, this world may work out just fine.

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