Wim Wenders, the German director whose great movies of the 1970s include “The American Friend,” has been a loyal, sometimes baffled friend of America for a long time. His view of American landscapes and folkways is often romantic and always affectionate, perhaps never more so than in “Land of Plenty.”
Taking up the divided, anxious state of post-9/11 American life, “Land of Plenty” is like a clumsy, well-meaning intervention in a family quarrel. Wenders may not have the power to heal the rifts his movie acknowledges but there is nonetheless something touching about his heartfelt concern.
Wenders has a soft heart, and also a sharp eye. Scrambling the easy polarities of left and right, red state and blue, he urges us to love one another as much as we love the beautiful country we share.
The characters whose job it is to deliver this lesson are burdened with some heavy metaphorical baggage. Lana (Michelle Williams) is a glowingly decent young woman raised in various far-off lands by missionary parents. She arrives in Los Angeles from Israel, and goes to work in a homeless shelter run by a minister (Wendell Pierce) who is an old colleague of her father. Her real mission is to establish contact with her uncle Paul (John Diehl), a Vietnam veteran.
Paul, meanwhile, cruises the streets of Los Angeles in a beat-up van full of homemade surveillance equipment, assessing possible terrorist threats and seeking out sleeper cells in parking lots and warehouses. Despite his aura of steely professionalism, Paul is strictly freelance, and in uncertain contact with reality. For him, the trauma of Vietnam was compounded by the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“If only I’d been on one of those planes,” he says to himself, and his feelings of helplessness and failure find an outlet in the operations he conducts.
Diehl gives a wry, cunning performance, allowing glimmers of Paul’s intelligence and decency to shine through. Williams’ easy charm rubs away whatever hints of smug self- righteousness might have clung to her character.
Which is not to say that “Land of Plenty” avoids sentimentality. On the contrary, it insists that expressions of caring and sympathy are the best available antidotes to hatred and intolerance. It is as hard to argue with this idea as it is wholeheartedly to believe it completely.
*** | “Land of Plenty”
NOT RATED |1 hour, 59 minutes| DRAMA|Directed by Wim Wenders; written by Wenders and Michael Meredith; photography by Franz Lustig; starring Michelle Williams, John Diehl, Shaun Toub, Wendell Pierce, Richard Edson, Burt Young|Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.