“I made it for you,” said director Wim Wenders near the end of breakfast.
The German director was blowing through town in support of “Don’t Come Knocking.” Starring Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange and Sarah Polley, the modern Western is playing in Denver exclusively at the Mayan.
His final destination? Butte, Mont., where he shot his and Shepard’s story about an actor who flees a movie set for … we’ll get to that later.
“I made it for you,” was the German director’s reply to a breach perhaps in filmmaker-critic decorum. Tape recorder off, I had stammered gratitude for “Wings of Desire,” his sublimely humane 1987 film about angels and people, the spirit and the flesh.
Yet his wry courtesy nailed the power his movies so often exert. They overtake us with images, with sounds and soundtracks. We take them personally. We receive them as gifts. So thank you very much.
When a film-curating friend returned last year from the Cannes Film Festival, he expressed some disappointment in “Don’t Come Knocking.”
Once I saw Wenders’ very fine meditation on loss, irresponsibility, time wasted – and, yes, the West – I understood. His sorrow wasn’t about what had unspooled in front of his eyes. It was about the other Wenders movies that had staked undisputed claims to his movie-loving soul.
In other words, tender as it is, “Don’t Come Knocking” isn’t “Paris, Texas.” Nonetheless, it did reunite the director and playwright Shepard more than 20 years after that film won the top prize at Cannes and international recognition for Wenders.
“We had a great time with ‘Paris, Texas,”‘ Wenders said of the 1984 film. L.M. Kit Carson adapted the lean, often muted tale of a tattered man finding his family only to relinquish it for the good from “Motel Chronicles,” Shepard’s play.
At the time, Wenders hoped Shepard would act in the movie. “He didn’t want to play in it at the time, although I begged him on my knees.”
Shepard, says Wenders, had better things to do.
“While we made ‘Paris, Texas,’ he shot ‘Country’ with Jessica Lange. He’d fallen madly in love with Jessica.” The opportunity for Shepard to make a film with Lange, jokes Wenders, “gave me no chance.”
“When I found out that was the real reason, I couldn’t blame him. I would have done the same. They got married afterward. They had children, and that’s why they never appeared together. The deal was one always stays at home when the other one works.”
But kids eventually grow up. And when they did, Wenders went knocking. He had been working on a story he thought could be his next project.
“I realized, what am I doing? I know the best writer in the world for this material.” He called Shepard, visited him in Minnesota, where he lived at the time. “He shredded my story to pieces. But he kept a grain of my story – that there was an unknown son.”
In “Don’t Come Knocking,” Shepard takes the role – and the reins – of Howard. He’s a still-untamed movie star whose flickering coincides with that of the once pre-eminent genre, the Western.
Early in the movie, Howard gallops away from the set of his latest picture. His impulsive escape takes him first to his mother’s home in Elko, Nev., a casino town still peppered with cowboy flavor.
Eva Marie Saint plays Howard’s mother. She hasn’t seen her son except as tabloid fodder for decades. Still, when an agent for the bond company shows up to remand Howard to the movie set, she lies to him. She also lets Howard know that he has a son in Butte.
The town hovers like a ghost betwixt the storied past and tenuous future. There Howard finds Earl, a surly son no longer yearning for a father. Lange plays Earl’s mother, Doreen. Another child by another on-location liaison, Sky (Polley) finds him.
One of the finest, wisest scenes in “Don’t Come Knocking” takes place between Howard and Doreen. After a night sitting on a couch in the middle of a furniture-strewn street, Howard has an epiphany. He’s not in Butte for Earl. He’s there to reclaim Doreen.
It’s laughably narcissistic – and sort of infuriating. And Doreen lets him know it as they stand on a seemingly empty street. But the camera reveals a guy watching from a recumbent bike in a storefront gym.
It’s wonderfully incongruous. The past – theirs, Butte’s – rubs up against the goofy, familiar present we all share.
Decades earlier, Wenders traveled to Butte. He had wanted to make his first American movie, 1982’s “Hammett,” in that once-vibrant burg. Dashiel Hammett’s “Red Harvest” inspired the road trip.
“It was one helluva a book,” he said. “And it takes place in a place I figured could only be fictional. It takes place in Poisonville.” That was the way inhabitants of that spoiling-for-a-fight mining town pronounced “Personville.”
With its mix of the fabled and the real, the American West has beguiled Wenders for decades. He mourns the theme-park tarting up of places like Monument Valley, where he decided against shooting the opening of “Don’t Come Knocking.”
Butte was always the terminus for the movie.
“In some places, the West is completely abandoned and obsolete and forgotten,” he said. “Sometimes these are the places I’m most attracted to when something just about to disappear.”
Wenders is not unlike the angels in “Wings of Desire.” Except the director bears witness to the spiritual yearnings of a place, as much as he listens to the needful ramblings of its inhabitants.
“Some of these places are so telling,” he said. “They tell about hopes and so many plans and generations with big ideas of what they will do in the West. And very often nature was just stronger.
“Sometimes I just feel it’s nice to preserve something that otherwise will not be seen anymore.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
Essential Wenders
“Wings of Desire” (1987): I put it first, because it was my first. Henri Alekan’s black-and-white cinematography of the spirit realm gives way sporadically to a color-rich Oz of human hope. Bruno Ganz stars, and Peter Falk makes an appearance as himself (sort of). The mix of angelic eavesdropping and human yearning also has gentle humor. On the set of a movie about Nazi Germany, Falk sketches an extra and thinks: “Wonder if she’s Jewish. … Yellow star means death. Why did they pick yellow? Sunflowers. Van Gogh killed himself. This drawing stinks.”
“Paris, Texas” (1984): Few films are so gentle about a place so mythically rugged. Harry Dean Stanton plays Travis, a man who hopes to heal himself by healing those he has wounded. We first meet him wandering through sunbeaten desert scrub. With Dean Stockwell and Nastassja Kinski; scored by Ry Cooder.
“The American Friend” (1977): Before there was Matt Damon’s talented Tom Ripley, there was Dennis Hopper’s disturbing turn as Patricia Highsmith’s infamous sociopath. Bruno Ganz plays an art restorer Ripley hopes to enlist in a murder. American directors Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray play a mobster and a painter respectively.
“Kings of the Road” (1975): Perhaps only a one-time film critic like Wenders would cast a film critic as his protagonist. In this road movie about a traveling film projector repairman, he did just that. German writer Hanns Zischler plays a suicidal man befriended by repairman Bruno (Rudigar Vogler).
“Buena Vista Social Club” (1998): This documentary about guitarist Ry Cooder’s journey to Havana to play with musicians from Cuba’s golden age is a mash note wrapped in a masterfully touching and observant film.
– Lisa Kennedy
