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A movie star is sitting on an old couch in the
middle of the street in Butte, Montana.
His name is Howard Spence, and he’s run away from
the set of his latest film, a Western being shot against the beautiful,
desolate backdrop of Moab, Utah. Something has drawn him to Butte, where
he once fell in love with a beautiful waitress.
As he sits there, troubled and
alone, there’s a sense that perhaps he's
beginning to realize all that he's been missing. His successes, his self-indulgence
(which has landed him some impressive tabloid headlines), and his compulsion to escape into drugs
or sex or the ego-boosting fantasy of the American Western...
all of these things have proven powerful distractions.
Maybe here, at "the scene of the crime," drawn by the possibility of
love and a family, he'll find a chance to begin truly living for the
first time.
Butte is almost a ghost town now, haunted with
echoes of the past. It won’t be easy for Howard
to re-enter relationships he left
in shambles for so many years. That journey
must begin with repentance and forgiveness. Is he up
to it?
That’s the premise of Don’t Come Knocking,
the new film directed by the great German filmmaker Wim Wenders, which
reunites him with the American actor and playwright Sam Shepard. In
1984, the two wrote a legendary film called Paris, Texas, about
another lost soul’s spiritual journey to mend what is broken. Now, more
than twenty years later, they’ve revisited the theme.
Where their first collaboration was a painful, mournful masterpiece,
Knocking is a lighter, funnier fiction. But once again
they've crafted an evocative, contemplative journey
full of characters who are longing for wholeness.
Shepard brings rough authenticity both to the
minimalist script and his performance in the lead role,
and he's helped by an impressive, eclectic supporting cast that includes
his longtime love Jessica Lange, Tim Roth in another eccentric turn, and
accomplished youngsters like Sarah Polley, Gabriel Mann, and Fairuza
Balk.
But this is a Wim Wenders film
through and through, characterized by his famously observant camerawork,
meditative pacing, and an intuitive grasp of how this rugged landscape
represents desolate spiritual territory.
Wenders has been doing
this sort of thing for almost three decades of filmmaking.
And since this is his first feature to receive
distribution in the U.S. in a few years, it's a fine time to look back
at his memorable work.
GUARDIAN ANGELS
When you watch a film by Wim Wenders,
you're asked to consider the world through starkly
different perspectives. Each of his narratives
focus on people whose views are limited, and who need
to be reconciled into a more complete understanding.
In his beloved, Cannes-award-winning masterpiece —
Wings of Desire (1987) — Wenders follows angels on
their daily beat through the troubled streets of Berlin before the wall
was torn down. There, an angel named Damiel (Bruno Ganz) wanders and
listens to the needy thoughts of the despairing citizens, and he marvels
at the faith of wide-eyed children. Damiel longs to know the joys of
sensory experience. And when he encounters a human being — a beautiful
circus trapeze performer named Marion (Solveig Dommartin) who longs for
communion with a kindred spirit — he finds the provocation to “take
the plunge” into human form and pursue her.
As her guardian angel, he offers almost
imperceptible spiritual comfort. As his muse, Marion lures him to embrace
the mystery of human experience, so that even the simple joy of holding
a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning inspires him to reverence and
wonder, revealing the sacred in the ordinary.
Peter Falk's "special
appearance" brings humor and a stroke of subtle genius to the
proceedings. Falk plays himself, strolling around a Berlin movie set where he's
playing, of course, an investigator. Damiel takes a particular liking to
Falk, for it seems that this beloved actor enjoys simple, ordinary pleasures more than
most. And as fans wave and shout for "Columbo!", Falk takes it in stride
and leads Damiel — and us — to unexpected revelations.
By tuning our attention to the perspective of
angels, viewers often find renewed appreciation for the incarnational
nature of creation, and greater apprehension of God’s love in the highs
and lows of daily life. Those rewards come from
attentive viewing, but also through patient filmmaking, and Wenders has
learned to be watchful and open to surprises in the course of a project.
In a recent issue of MovieMaker,
he volunteered
a list of 50 tips for filmmakers. One in particular stands out: “Films
can reveal the invisible, but you have to be willing to let it show.”
I asked Wenders what he meant by that
during my recent interview with him for Christianity Today. “This is one of the amazing
achievements of film,” he assured me, “that they can reveal something
that you can’t actually see. When I started out as a painter, I strictly
believed in the visible, and that the visible was it. And in the
course of making movies, I realized that something I hadn’t actually
seen in front of my camera was then there in the movie.”
This was especially true during the filming of
Wings of Desire. While Wenders
was, at the time, distancing himself from his religious upbringing, he
found that filming from the perspective of imaginary
angels caused him to discover and capture wondrous and
meaningful things that he had never planned. “I never really thought
that a film could deal with anything metaphysical…. And when we finished
it, I thought, ‘How much help can I possibly get?’ It felt like I had
almost made the film completely unconsciously, and that the angels that
I had sort of ‘called’ had actually been there to help me.”
The audience’s enthusiasm for
Wings of Desire around the
world amazed Wenders, and the experience of making
the film and observing its influence played a part in renewing his
Christian faith. “There was no explanation for the powerful impact that
these figures had on audiences," he recalls. "What I had taken for a metaphor had,
sort of miraculously, materialized. So I came to terms with the fact
that the invisible was powerfully working in movies. I just had to let
it happen. You can’t make it happen. I don’t think you can consciously
evoke that. At least, I didn’t.”
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIAN
In 2004, Wenders
delivered another story of contrasting
perspectives: Land of Plenty.
(While it
did not receive a wide release in the U.S., the film impressed
film festival audiences, and will probably arrive on
DVD by the end of 2005.) Wenders’ germ of an idea was crafted into a
story by a friend, writer/director Scott Derrickson, the talented
storyteller who brought us The Exorcism of Emily Rose. We can
sense the strong Christian convictions of both artists in this tale, and
yet, the film is free of the didacticism and preaching
we find in so many films
described as “Christian.”
In Land of Plenty’s exploration of life in
America post-September 11th , the question is “plenty of
what”? Trouble or goodwill? Evil or grace? Violence or healing?
A Vietnam veteran named Paul (John Diehl), haunted
by the darkness he’s seen, is sent over the edge into paranoia, fear,
and constant distrust by 9/11. He appoints himself as an agent for
“homeland security,” lurking about the backstreets of Los Angeles in
search of terrorist activity.
But when a young missionary woman named Lana
(Michelle Williams of The Station Agent and Brokeback Mountain)
returns to the U.S., she crosses Paul’s path and interrupts his
determined vendetta. Together, they encounter a violent crisis and
shoulder the burden of delivering a dead body back home to his family.
Paul proceeds believing that he will find the core of a terrorist plot
at the end of the road; but Lana is looking for peace, healing, and
resolution. Their road leads straight to Ground Zero in New York, where Wenders strikes chords of profound hope in the midst of haunting,
horrible memories.
Williams is radiant in the film,
and it's too bad that the large audiences who were impressed with her
work in Brokeback Mountain missed out on this sensitive,
memorable performance. Wenders sculpted Lana’s character specifically for
Williams. “She had that beauty and simplicity … that inner light that a
character like this would have to have.”
Wenders wanted Williams help in
bringing a fresh vision of vital Christianity to the screen. “I was so
appalled, when we made the film in 2003, at how Christian ideas has been
sort of hijacked and turned into their very opposite. But I figured that
compassion had all of a sudden left politics, and social conscience had
left politics, and it was all talk, and the talk was mainly lying.
Everything I subscribe to as a Christian had been strangely perverted.
So I thought if ever I was going to create a character who was a
Christian, she would live it and not talk about it or make a big deal
about it. She would have a sort of childlike trust and belief. She was
just going to live.”
And in the end, Lana's childlike faith makes a
difference in more lives than her own.
Wenders hopes his beliefs never come across in a
heavy-handed fashion, hitting audiences over the head. He explains,
“It’s the nature of Christianity that it needs to work through
conviction, and because of the way you approach it, and not by trying to
become a missionary through your work.”
Lana’s faith, he says, would not be effective if
she was “preaching” to others in the film. “Her faith works strictly
through the way she is acting.”
VIEWS FROM DIFFERING
VANTAGE POINTS
Wenders was born in Dusseldorf, Germany, in
1945, and earned attention internationally for the films he made there.
Among his many notable early projects, he adapted two novels: Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1973); and Patricia Highsmith’s
novel Ripley’s Game, which became a film called called The
American Friend (1977) and starred a young Dennis Hopper.
He went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1994 for
Paris, Texas,
which starred Harry Dean Stanton. These stories take
place on the borderlands between territories, between men and women,
between worldviews, and between generations. And because he is a
Christian himself, Wenders finds glimmers of hope, reconciliation, and
redemption in even the darkest places.
Until the End of the World
(1991), his sprawling science-fiction love story, demonstrated that even
the most promising technology can, in the hands of evil men, be twisted
into unhealthy tools for self-indulgence. William Hurt’s understated
performance contrasts nicely with Solveig Dommartin’s reckless energy.
But
it’s Sam Neil’s patient virtue and his thoughtful narration that
provide an anchor for this meandering road movie about the future, the
threat of nuclear apocalypse, and what happens when we become obsessed
with our own dreams. (This film also featured the debut of U2’s famous
song of the same title, and produced what many
consider the finest various-artists rock soundtrack ever compiled.)
In Faraway, So Close!, 1993’s sequel
to Wings of Desire, Damiel’s former angelic colleague, Cassiel
(Otto Sander), “takes the plunge” and becomes a human being. But unlike
Damiel, who finds the journey exhilarating, Cassiel falls in with gun
runners, despairs of his own sinful nature and asks, in the words of a
Lou Reed song at the heart of the film, “Why can’t I be good? Why can’t
I act like a man?”
The End of Violence (1997)
follows the fall of a narrow-minded moviemaker (Bill Pullman) from his
Hollywood success — and excess
— into encounters that change his perspective
and give him a sense of what life is about.
(Singer-songwriter Sam Phillips, another artist who has spent her career
exploring the fringe territories of faith, makes a surprise appearance
here.)
Mel Gibson plays a troubled policeman who wanders
into bizarre society of misfits in The Million Dollar Hotel
(2000), where a suicidal young man (Jeremy Davies) falls in
love with a mischievous girl (Milla Jovovich) and learns that even lives
of hardship are full of available grace and wonder.
In Wenders’ documentaries like Buena Vista
Social Club (1999), his enthusiasm for music is
contagious, and we come to learn how courage and love can produce beauty
in the midst of hardship. In a sense, Wenders is a Cameron Crowe for
fans of art movies — every film is propelled by its own mix-tape
soundtrack, music that reflects his passion
for great songwriting.
Each of these stories offers its own insights and
haunting questions, but Wenders’ work requires a vigilant audience.
Sometimes, his meandering journeys lead to profundity
(Paris, Texas), and sometimes they remain a sequence of odd and
interesting episodes (The End of Violence). His
films can seem slow moving and discomfortingly quiet for viewers
accustomed to action movies and slick Hollywood productions.
That’s
because the “action” in a Wenders film is mysterious and sometimes quite
subjective. They aren’t for people who want things explained to them —
they’re for viewers who know the rewards of getting involved in the
film, considering a character’s relationship with others, the landscape,
history, and faith.
“The blockbusters are at the end of the spectrum
where what you see is what you get,” Wenders explains. “There is no
other meaning than what they show you, and there’s no other message than
what they tell you. … And sometimes you come out and you’ve forgotten
what it was all about, because it is an aim in itself. It wants to take
you by storm and that’s enough.”
He focuses his energies on making, and
appreciating, a different kind of film. “People… and critics as well…
have, in a big way, forgotten that there is another way of receiving a
movie, one that asks you actively to be a part of it. The blockbusters
don’t want you to be part of it. They just serve it to you on a plate
and then you eat it and that’s it.” But art films, he says, work
differently. “They’re telling you, ‘Here, this is just a suggestion, and
if you come in, and if you let yourself be drawn into it, it’ll be the
greatest dream you ever had.’ The blockbusters don’t let us dream
— they make us dream.”
What's his idea of a film that
lets us dream? He recommends Terrence Malick’s
recent masterpiece, The New World,
which was sorely overlooked
and misunderstood. “The New World made me dream like no other
film. … I said to Scott [Derrickson], ‘The last time I saw a movie of
these proportions was more than thirty years ago, and that was 2001:
A Space Odyssey.’ I sat through the film with my mouth and my eyes
wide open… amazed that the film would actually put me in a position to
dream it up myself, so to speak. … I think eventually the film will go
down as a classic, and we’ll remember 2005 as the year that The New
World was overlooked, and we will not even know any more which
movies got the Oscars.”
He explains that watching films like Malick’s and
his own requires a different kind of attention, a vigilance and a
participation, that blockbusters do not require. “You really have to add
something on your own. It’s like when you read a book and you have to
read between the lines. You have to fill the space. In The New
World, you have to dream yourself into it — and then, all of a
sudden, it is the richest film in the world, because it uses your own
imagination, your own fantasy, your own dreams to make it complete. And
then it is so complete, that you come out and say you’ve never ever
experienced that in any movie.”
To describe the experience of
"dreaming your way in" to a Wenders film, I turned to the filmmaker's
friend and colleague, Scott Derrickson. He
responds:
"Chesterton wrote, ‘Angels
can fly because they take themselves lightly.’ There is a kind of
‘severe lightness’ in Wim Wender's work — he manages to portray human
angst and alienation without succumbing to morbidity or fashionable
despair. His films are serious portrayals of human longing,
and those films avoid the common movie
extremes of brooding cynicism on one side, and facile
sentimentalism on the other. He has always made films that
capture the ineffable — films that allow viewers to experience the
transcendent mystery of modern times and places. He has done this
without resorting so much to the written word, but to images
themselves. He understands what separates cinema from the other art
forms, and he gives his audience experiences that cannot be found in any
other medium."
What would he recommend to
viewers approaching a Wenders film for the first time? Derrickson says:
"My first recommendation
would be to simply recognize that unlike Hollywood films, Wenders' films
assume that you will bring your own thoughts and feelings to the
moviegoing experience. He won't tell you what to feel, so when you
watch his films, you have to think about what YOU are seeing, what YOU
are hearing, and what YOU are feeling — in short, you have to interact
with the film. Hollywood movies manipulate your emotions, but his films
never do. I would also pay attention to Wenders' great muse, which is
'a sense of place.' He understood that human longing drives us to
travel — to move beyond our houses, into our own cities, and often
across our countries and out into the world. He is more sensitive to
'place' than any filmmaker I know, and you must always pay attention to
his locations and landscapes; try to see how his visual space ties in to
his characters and stories."
THE ANTI-WESTERN
In that sense, Wenders’ latest release — Don’t
Come Knocking — is a perfect summation of his strengths. The
silences are as important as the conversations. The landscapes are as
important as the characters in the foreground. They all contribute to
questions that the viewer is encouraged to consider.
Wim Wenders had made his cowboy
movie, and it’s the
antithesis of the classic Western. How often have we seen the
all-American cowboy win the heart of the girl, outwit and outgun the bad
guys, and then, when the woman begs him to stay home on the ranch, he
rides off with a tip of his hat, bound to wandering and seeking
adventure? In Wenders’ perspective, that is a distinctly American
impulse… and it lies at the root both of the new worlds we’ve conquered
and the fulfillment we’ve never attained. He starts
at the other end of the story, when the wanderer decides to turn back.
(It's a wonder Wenders didn't cue up that great U2/Johnny Cash song.)
During his venture back to Butte, Howard the
runaway actor stops in to see his mother (Eva Marie Saint). She welcomes
him like a prodigal son, and only mentions the fact that his father had
died. The fact that they say so little about this suggests that Howard’s
father was not a significant, substantial influence or presence in his
life. Perhaps Howard’s tendency to run from life and responsibility
started with that example. In the meantime, his mother keeps his room
just as it was when he was a kid, and you can see the signs of his
dreams there. But there’s the sense now that the dream betrayed him,
that he missed what he really needed.
Like father like son — Howard discovers that he has
a boy named Earl (Mann) from that
former fling in Butte. Earl's on
a rather reckless and drug-rattled ride,
chasing his rock star dream. His girlfriend Amber (Balk)
truly loves him, but she's paying the price
for it. It’s likely Earl will
leave her in his dust, the way Dad left Mom.
And Dad sees this. The prodigal father has come
home to see himself in the mirror, reflected in the image of his son.
This only deepens his regret. The rejection of his former flame (Lange, in a delightfully spirited performance) doesn’t help, despite his
appeal for reconciliation.
Is there any hope for Howard? Can he quit dreaming,
quit thinking he can save the day, and admit that his actions have led
to catastrophe? Howard wants to fix things, but like
that Sam Phillips song says, he's trying to fix them with "broken
hands." Redemption will have to come from somewhere
else, and in the end, he may not get what he wants, but he might find what he needs.
THE PRODIGAL FATHER
Extraordinary moments are almost common in Wenders’
films, but they don’t come through special effects. Wenders gazes
unflinchingly at the world in all of its beauty and ugliness. His human
characters are never towering heroes. They are broken people, racked
with and ravaged by sin. But occasionally, when they humble themselves,
grace moves through them.
Sometimes, these visions are discomfortingly bleak.
In fact, the reviewer at the prominent Christian film
film review site Movieguide was so troubled
by Howard’s journey through temptation, failure, and foolishness, that he
rated Don’t Come Knocking as “abhorrent,” “boring,” and “trash.”
But that response reveals more about the reviewer
than it does about the film. Wenders’ spiritual investigations
lead him to observe and consider some severely misguided characters. So yes,
there is a lot of “trash” to be seen along the way. But in Matthew
6:22-23, Christ says, "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are
good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad,
your whole body will be full of darkness.” This verse, quoted
prominently in Faraway, So Close, indicates
that those who go seeking
offense will find it, but those who seek meaning and beauty will find
it. Some may steer clear of Don't Come Knocking
for personal reasons, but it's ridiculous to condemn a film about the
value of family and the rewards of responsibility just because the film
reveals the unpleasant consequences of running from both.
There aren’t any Christian characters around in
Don’t Come Knocking, as there were in last year’s Land of Plenty,
to bring up Jesus’ name; nor are there visible angels as in Wings
of Desire commenting on the work of the Holy Spirit. But we can see
evidence of the spirit prodding those wayward souls toward redemption.
The story reflects Christ’s own parables, where a
gentle soul might help someone wounded, or the wages
of sin might catch up with a fool.
Wenders calls this contemporary parable a
“prodigal father” story. It’s a tale prevalent in movies today, as
generations growing up fatherless are searching to fill that void, and
as men who have run from family and responsibility begin to yearn for
what they’ve missed. You can feel that ache in a wave of recent films:
Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with
Steve Zissou, Hirozaki Koreeda’s Nobody Knows, Andrei
Zvyagintsev’s The Return, and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.
And yet, the film is charged with personal passion.
Sam Shepard has, in interviews, admitted that this story he’s written
with Wenders reflects his own troubled relationship with his father. But
Wenders hears echoes of his own past in the story as well.
“[My father] was a great father. I loved him very
much. He was always there for me. And then … we sort of had a falling
out when I was 16, 17, and 18 years old. We actually didn’t speak for a
number of years. And then we slowly talked to each other again and
became very good friends. … I spent his last six months with him on a
day-to-day basis.”
The reconciliation clearly meant a great deal to
the filmmaker, especially in view of the lack he has seen in others’
lives. “When I grew up I only had one friend who didn’t have a father —
and that was always horrifying me. I had so much pity for the guy. …
[The] fact that he didn’t have a father, and didn’t even know his
father, was inconceivable for me.
“And then eventually it was as if this friend
multiplied — I knew more and more people who grew up without a father.
The absent father became a regular cultural and social phenomenon. … It
almost seemed during the ‘90s that there were more people without
a father than people with a father.”
Due to that precious relationship with his father,
and to the “incredible lack” he would have felt without it, he says, “I
was attracted to telling the story of that absence.”
But, of course, he tells it from
different perspectives: “From the beginning I wanted to tell the story from both sides —
the guy who missed being with his kids, and who missed being there for
them and receiving their love and giving his love; and … from the
perspective of these young adults who have this guy waltz in and say,
‘Hi, I’m your father,’ and how they feel about it.”
He was surprised at the correlation of this film
with Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. “I think it’s in the air. I think
it shows how much it’s really relevant, exactly. Jim Jarmusch is one of
my best friends. We are not in any way competitive. And the fact that
Jim, unbeknownst to me, made a film about the same subject made it clear
for both of us that we had hit on something that what of grave
contemporary concern.”
A LIFE STORY
The polarized perspectives in
films like Wings of Desire and Land of Plenty could represent
Wenders’ personal history, growing up in a divided Germany, and
struggling on the border between faith and doubt.
(His Catholic upbringing, departure from the
church, and return to faith are
recounted in Image journal, in an
interview performed by Derrickson.)
Wenders was not a social person when he was young,
and he started his artistic journey intentionally seeking “a pretty
lonesome life.” But when he discovered the excitement of composing
images on film instead of a canvas, he was drawn into a world in which
collaboration was essential. “I think that through the movies, and the
work that I’m doing, I became somebody else. You’ll see a lot of traces
of these characters in my films: Slowly they come to terms with the
world, and they have encounters, and they are longing to belong to a
different context, both physically and spiritually. I think as I look
back at my movies, that is the story of my life right there.”
Don’t Come Knocking, like all of Wenders’
films, is a journey off the beaten path. It can take
you to a view out over the rugged land of human behavior,
where you can see both the damage of our
choices and the work of grace. It takes dedication and hard
work to reach views like that, but after a while, you learn that the
journey is worth it, and it yields rewards that cannot be
enjoyed any other way.
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