Don't Come Knocking

On the verge of a nervous breakdown, aging film star and legendary carouser Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) absconds from the desert set of his latest cowboy movie (still wearing a cowboy hat), and seeks refuge back home with the mother (Eva Marie Saint) he has not seen in three decades. She lets slip that he might have a grown son in Montana, so he sets off for the town of Butte, where years ago he had shot his breakthrough picture and enjoyed the company of the local ladies.

There he finds old flame Doreen (played by Shepard's real-life wife Jessica Lange), still working in the same coffee shop where he left her a quarter of a century ago, and is introduced to her (and his) son, an irascible musician named Earl (Gabriel Mann), whose dim-witted girlfriend Amber (Fairuza Balk) thinks Howard is a "narc." The meeting does not go well and, as Howard tries to bridge the divide between his chaotic present and long lost past, he must also contend with an obsessive/compulsive bounty hunter (Tim Roth), sent by the film's insurers to recover their leading asset, and with a mysterious girl named Sky (Sarah Polley) who keeps following him around with an urn under her arm.

In the annals of cinema history, 2005 will be remembered as the year when American independent cinema was swamped with disrupted families on a quest to rediscover their abandoned past. Jim Jarmusch did it in Broken Flowers, James Marsh did it in The King and Duncan Tucker did it in Transamerica. Where these directors used the theme to reflect a sense that America has, for better or worse, lost touch with its roots, Wim Wenders seems much more concerned with revisiting his own past as a filmmaker.

Way back in 1984, he virtually invented this sub-genre with his international breakthrough Paris, Texas (about - you've guessed it - a man on an American odyssey to rebuild his fractured family) and, while that film established the template for US arthouse cinema for years to come, making Wenders the darling of the indie scene, the truth is that, with the notable exceptions of Wings Of Desire (1987) and the documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999), the German director has struggled to make a decent film since. Without Wender's legendary name attached, one can only imagine that overblown, pretentious nonsense such as Far Away, So Close (1993), The End Of Violence (1997) and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) would never have been greenlit in the first place.

Not only does Don't Come Knocking represent an unmistakable bid by Wenders to relive the old glories of Paris, Texas, but he seems at pains to make the connections between the two films as explicit as possible. There is the broad similarity of plot, as well as the welcome involvement once again of Shepard, who co-wrote Paris, Texas. Even the new film's opening scene, whose blistering desert landscape, coupled with the austere twangs of a guitar, evokes directly the iconic prologue to the earlier piece. The parallels are clinched even further by the fact that the seminal events in Howard's past took place while he was on a film set in a forgotten American town, at roughly the same time that Wenders was shooting his own cinematic triumph in a lost corner of the US called Paris, Texas.

Is Wenders now as old and washed-up as his protagonist, desperately searching for a past that he turned his back on years ago? Yes and no. Certainly, Don't Come Knocking is a finely crafted film, full of quirky characters, excellent performances, beautiful locations and exquisitely panoramic cinematography (courtesy of the talented Franz Lustig). Yet it all seems just a little bit obvious, a little too by-the-book, even if, in this case, it is a book that Wenders helped to write.

There are no great surprises awaiting the viewer, nothing that takes arthouse cinema to its next point on the map, just a slick retread of elements that the director had already perfected two decades earlier, while the next generation of filmmakers has long ago moved on, taking his legacy in more innovative directions.

In a sense, that is the point of Don't Come Knocking. Howard ends up where he started, while it is left to his newfound children to head off to an unknown future, even as they drive a vintage Packard, belonging to a grandfather they never knew.

This is hardly Wenders' most adventurous feature, although it might qualify as his bravest in its dramatisation of not only the director's undoubted influence on the cinema of the last 20 years, but also his increasing redundancy within it.

In short: new film, old hat.