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Film: Don't Come Knocking [R] 122 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $7.50
When 1st Seen: 13 April 2006
Where Viewed: AMC Loews Uptown, Seattle, WA
Review Dedicated to: Dennis and Mary Alice B. of Villa Rica, GA
Sam Shepard has done it again! He’s gone and written a play with a great role for himself and a peach for Jessica Lange. You got to figure if nobody else will, you’ve got to go and do it yourself. The problem is that this time, the play itself, while filled with all of the right ingredients, unfortunately came out of the oven half-baked—maybe three quarters-baked. Don’t Come Knocking, directed by Wim (president of the European Film Academy) Wenders, is Shepard’s send up to a lonely, old actor of westerns that as the sun starts to set on his storied career as archived meticulously (warts and all) by his own mother played effortlessly by screen legend, Eva Marie Saint, suddenly starts to get the rudiments of a conscience and seeks out a former love, Doreen (Jessica Lange), of twenty years gone by. In the process, he discovers he has not only one but two long-lost children: a son Earl (Gabriel Mann) and a daughter Sky (Sarah Polley). Before he can really make amends, can he make amends?, he is handcuffed back to Utah to finish making his final western by a stern British insurance agent played smartly by Tim (“Reservoir Dogs Mr. Orange himself”) Roth. So, all the right ingredients: great actors, an interesting (at least seemingly so) story, majestic settings of the expansive western USA from Utah, Nevada, and Montana; yet a feeling of emptiness and incompletion by the time the final of the 122 minutes wore past. I never think it’s a good sign if I check my watch more than once during a movie—how about seven times?
What’s wrong with the picture? First of all, the script has a clear direction, and yet it meanders only to finally empty into nowhere. Absolutely nothing gets resolved. Not one thing. I belabor the point, but imagine you are forced to watch paint dry, and then, just when it is about to finally cure and set you free, it suddenly peels off the wall and lands in flecks and specks on your hardwood floor. What does that mean? What does that tell you? No, I wanted to rewind the film and set it on a different path. I wanted Howard Spence’s (Sam Shepard) movie cowboy legend, to wake up and smell the coffee of a life lived badly and to go about making amends. Amends with his long-lost, dear, widowed mother whose only communication with her son came from outlandish pictures and headlines in the National Enquirer. I wanted him to apologize to Doreen for dumping her back in Butte, MT pregnant and lonely. I wanted him to, at least, remember who the mother of Sky was and to take his now grown up daughter home. I wanted him to see in his son, Earl, the potential of a great life he had not lived and attempt in some small way to repay him for lost time. Instead I got him handcuffed to the steering wheel of a Porsche Cayenne headed back to Utah to film the final scene of what would likely be his last major motion picture of his career because the company that financed the film was certainly going to stay on budget. I find it nearly painful to say this because I have been a huge Sam Shepard/Jessica Lange fan since I began my movie review career way back in the dark ages of the late 1980s, but Don’t Come Knocking, left me willing to oblige.
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