From:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/awards/cannes/review_display.jsp?
vnu_content_id=1000905062

Don't Come Knocking


By Kirk Honeycutt

The reteaming of director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard, who
collaborated on "Paris, Texas" 21 years ago, yields a dry, spare, odd
and oddly satisfying drama about a modern-day lonesome cowboy, lost
in a desert of his own making, who seeks salvation by searching out
those he left behind. For the most part shying away from
sentimentality and showing little concern for plausibility, "Don't
Come Knocking" expresses itself with deadpan humor, striking imagery,
Western iconography and outbursts of strong emotions.

Shepard stars in the film along with the lady of his life, Jessica
Lange, and a strong cast that includes Tim Roth, Gabriel Mann and
Sarah Polley, which gives the film boxoffice luster. Since many
characters are puzzling if not downright off-putting, the Sony
Pictures Classics release will probably finds acceptance only in
adult specialty venues.

Howard Spence (Shepard) is supposedly a movie star with a career
mostly in Westerns. Given that Hollywood hardly makes Westerns
anymore, this is the first of the film's many puzzles. Later in the
movie, he will insist he is "washed up." Yet as the story begins, he
is starring in a Western being shot in Monument Valley.

After many a night of debauchery with drugs, alcohol and young women,
Howard suddenly needs to flee his life. So he mounts a horse and
gallops away from the set. When the crew realizes their lead actor is
missing, a call goes out to the insurance company. A detective named
Roth is put on the case whose button-downed, single-minded
personality brings comic fun to all his scenes.

Maxing out his ATM cards and shedding nearly all his belongings,
Howard heads to his hometown of Elko, Nev., and a mother (Eva Marie
Saint) he supposedly hasn't seen or even called in 30 years. She
certainly greets him cheerfully enough with only mild words of rebuke.

Howard finds a scrapbook of his press clippings from which you learn
that this "Western bad boy's" real career has consisted of
inebriation, scandal and police arrests. Why on earth did that
insurance company ever bond a Howard Spence picture?

His mother just happens to mention that a young woman called her
about 30 years ago from Butte, Mont., saying that she was carrying
Howard's child. This news apparently never reached Howard. (You have
to get used to the sort of illogic that insists the woman would have
no way of tracking down a film star.)

Shocked and possibly a little pleased, Howard lights out for Butte
with the detective breathing down his neck. Howard's MO doesn't
change much, for he still gets drunk and wakes up in a bed covered
with young girls.

His old flame Doreen (Lange) is easy to find in Butte: She runs the
coffee shop where she once worked as a waitress. She takes one look
at Howard and remarks, "Well, it took you long enough." (Shepard
loves laconic understatements.) She seems amused more than upset or
angry about Howard's abrupt reappearance, but you later realize she
is doing some acting herself.

On their next encounter, she off-handedly points out Howard's son too
him. Earl (Gabriel Mann) is a surly rock musician, who can outdo his
father in loutish behavior.

Meanwhile, a young woman named Sky (Polley) arrives in Butte,
clutching an urn with her mother's ashes and making inquiries about
Howard. You can pretty much guess that she too is a product of one of
Howard's short flings during that shoot in Butte.

The convergence of all these character including the detective in
this depressed old mining town results in several emotional outbursts
of heroic proportions. At one point, an enraged Earl throws his
furniture and belongings out of his second-story window onto a street
in an area of that appears mostly abandoned.

For two days and one night, characters turn up and hang out among
these ruined belongings. Earl even salvages a guitar and plays an
instant composition, "Where is Howard?," while his hippie girlfriend
(Fairuza Balk) dances on the broken couch.

In this forlorn setting, the prodigal father and two children reach
not exactly a resolution but a kind of acceptance of the situation.

Shepard, cowboy handsome with a hard, lived-in face, gives Howard a
perpetually startled look, the look of a man who has just awakened
from a bad 30-year dream. Lange uses irony and calculated coolness to
disguise her rage at this selfish and cowardly man she once loved.

Mann and Polley express polar opposite reactions to the father who
unknowingly abandoned them: The son vehemently rejects Howard while
Polley clings to a yearning curiosity.

Western-tinged music from T-Bone Burnett and the open spaces and worn-
out town captured by Franz Lustig's crystal-clear cinematography
locate this tale in last vestiges of the Old West perhaps a reminder
that Howard's rugged individualism is also a relic of the past.

What the movie deigns not to answer is the question Howard's mother
poses to him: "How'd you get to be such a mess, Howard?" "Don't Come
Knocking" only tries to pull him out of this mess.


DON'T COME KNOCKING
Sony Pictures Classsics
HanWay presents a Peter Schwartzkopff production by Reverse Angle
Credits: Director: Wim Wenders; Writer: Sam Shepard; Producer: Peter
Schwartzkopff; Executive producers: Jeremy Thomas, In-Ah Lee, Wim
Wenders; Director of photography: Franz Lustig; Production designer:
Nathan Amondson; Music: T-Bone Burnett; Costumes: Caroline Eselin;
Editors: Peter Pzygodda, Oli Weiss.
Cast: Howard Spence: Sam Shepard; Doreen: Jessica Lange, Sutter: Tim
Roth; Earl: Gabriel Mann; Sky: Sarah Polley; Amer: Fairuza Balk;
Lulu: Eva Marie Saint; Director: George Kennedy.
No MPAA rating, running time 126 minutes

From: http://www.variety.com/index.asp?
layout=cannes2005&content=review&reviewid=VE1117927187&categoryId=31&r
evsub=19&query=don''t%20come%20knocking

Don't Come Knocking

(Germany-France-U.K.-U.S.)
A Sony Classics Pictures release (in U.S.) of a HanWay presentation
of a Peter Schwartzkopff production by Reverse Angle. (International
sales: HanWay Films, London.) Produced by Schwartzkopff, Karsten
Brunig, In-Ah Lee. Executive producers, Jeremy Thomas, Wim Wenders.
Co-producer, Carsten Lorenz. Directed by Wim Wenders. Screenplay, Sam
Shepard, story by Shepard, Wenders.

Howard Spence - Sam Shepard
Doreen - Jessica Lange
Sutter - Tim Roth
Earl - Gabriel Mann
Sky - Sarah Polley
Amber - Fairuza Balk
Howard's Mother - Eva Marie Saint
Old Ranch Hand - James Gammon
Director - George Kennedy
Starlet - Marley Shelton
Wild Eye - Rodney A. Grant
Producer 1 - Tim Matheson
Producer 2 - Julia Sweeney
Mr. Daily - Kurt Fuller
First A.D - James Roday
First Girl - Majandra Delfino
Second Girl - Marieh Delfino


By TODD MCCARTHY

Two decades after their Palme d'Or-winning "Paris, Texas," Wim
Wenders and Sam Shepard find the roads out West a little rougher than
they were before in "Don't Come Knocking." Working on themes having
to do with an errant father, the wages of irresponsibility and the
inability to look within, the team strikes some resonant chords but
also hits notes that simply don't ring true and are borderline
risible at times, making for a problematic picture artistically and
commercially.
Perennially drawn to stories of convulsive family dysfunction and
absent relations, Shepard has here written for himself the role of a
famous Western film star who, after a lifetime of dissolute,
undisciplined and illegal behavior, literally rides away from a Utah
film shoot to seek out what meager roots he has and, eventually, to
find the offspring he never knew he had.

It's only Howard Spence's fame that allows him to get away with doing
so many women, drinks and drugs and not pay a steep price. He may be
over the hill, but he still has the leading part in what appears to
be a traditional Western being directed by a veteran (George Kennedy).

Now, however, Howard's had enough, and he heads from Moab to Elko,
Nev., to see his mother (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he's been out of
touch for 30 years and to whom he says, "I don't know what to do with
myself anymore."

From the outset, there are details that don't feel right and
accumulate to provide a general sense of the picture being off the
beam. Described and shown as having played straight-arrow heroes in
the Randolph Scott mold, Howard would have to have been at the apex
of his career around 1975-85, when Westerns, especially the type in
question, were hardly being made. Even if he had been a huge star,
would he still, around age 60, be instantly recognized by nearly
everyone who sees him, including dozens of teenage girls at a motel,
three of whom spend the night with him?

When his mother finally sees her son for the first time in decades,
she natters blithely on as if there were nothing out of the ordinary,
and when they arrive at her house after an aborted restaurant visit,
she almost immediately bids him goodnight even though it's still
light outside. It's that kind of movie.

Howard spends the night getting arrested for drunk and disorderly
conduct at a local casino. Later, Mom does manage to remember that a
woman from Montana called some time back with the news that she'd had
Howard's kid, which gives him reason to roll his late father's car
(which is about as old as Howard) out of the garage and head for
Butte, at pic's 50-minute mark.

As of this stage, Howard has exhibited absolutely no redeeming
qualities as a man, having lived this long doing exactly as he
pleased -- due to the luck of rugged good looks -- but developing no
value system and learning nothing about consideration for others,
professional responsibility or self-respect. He's a void, the sum of
his fictional roles and lurid tabloid headlines.

All this ill-prepares him for what lies waiting in Butte, a former
metropolis of the West gone largely to seed. Howard tracks down old
flame Doreen (Jessica Lange), who runs a lively local watering hole
and points out their son, Earl (Gabriel Mann), performing with a band
onstage. Upon meeting his father, Earl flies off the handle, ranting
that he's never heard of him (unlike everyone else in the film) and
eventually tossing all his belongings into the street and insisting
it's too late for him to have a father.

Earl's wild-man orneriness contrasts starkly with the gentle behavior
of a woman who turns out to be Howard's other hitherto unknown sprig,
Sky (Sarah Polley), who walks around town with an urn containing the
remains of her (unidentified) mother until Howard briefly gives her
the time of day.

Unfortunately, Howard is inadequate to the task of connecting with
either of his kids, and hits the wall with Doreen when he suggests
they should have married and makes the impulsive left-field proposal
of a reconciliation. Although they are meant to pack climactic power,
these confrontations have a weirdly inauthentic feel to them as well,
in their lack of credible dramatic rhythms and the paucity of meaning
that stems from them.

There's just no getting under the skin of Shepard's Howard, a
thoroughly unsympathetic guy who, in the end, is only at home in the
world of fantasy and no strings. Shepard conveys the man's inner
angst far too often by tilting his head down and putting his fingers
to the bridge of his nose in inarticulate exasperation, which in the
end suggests little of what's really going on inside him.

Lange gives a more developed and rounded performance in an almost
identical role in Jim Jarmusch's similarly themed Cannes
entry "Broken Flowers," as here she switches abruptly from acceptance
to torrential abuse of her ex. Polley benefits from playing the only
quiet and reasonable character on the horizon, while Tim Roth is
uncharacteristically starchy as a detective engaged by the film
company to track down the missing star and bring him back to work.

Shot on evocative, grand locations, pic has an expansive look on a
moderate budget. T Bone Burnett's score proves erratic, supporting
the action fulsomely at times and distracting from it at others.