Knock Out

Don't Come Knocking

Directed by Wim Wenders

South Beach's pastel colors made an appropriate setting for Wim Wenders to receive a Career Achievement Award at the Miami International Film Festival this past weekend. In Wender's newest film, Don't Come Knocking, the German-born filmmaker's infatuation with American culture reaches a vibrant peak. Here, Wenders exults in the bright, bold colors of the American landscape. The focus on Howard Spence (Sam Shepherd), an aging star of cowboy movies who ditches his latest production to go searching for his past, achieves greatness whenever Wenders mixes the blinding intensity of Howard's social obligations with the warm and dark tones of his family life.

It's a Kodachrome vision of the United States: sunlight, neon, land, people and their heritage all dazzle and confound.

Wender's day and night palette (triumphantly rendered by cinematographer Franz Lustig) expresses his awe of America's multiplicity.

He views the vast Western exteriors that attest to the nation's openness as well as the deep sentiment associated with American cinema's signature genre, the Western.

That genre gave birth to the prototypical road movie, the form Wenders first assayed in Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. (The latter the source of the famous Wender's phrase: "The Yankees have colonized our conscience.")

Wenders showed the depth of such exotic, cultural programming in his ongoing series of American-made features, starting with the 1984 Paris, Texas, which was also, like Don't Come Knocking, a collaboration with playwright/actor Shepherd.

None of these movies are exactly realistic: End of Violence, Billion Dollar Hotel, The Soul of a Man and Land of Plenty are all moral fables-the best of them positively fantasmagorical.

So, when Howard imitates the "Heigh-ho, Silver!" pose of a cowboy hero rearing back on his steed, it triggers the realization that nobody actually makes movies like that anymore, yet we all hunger for the myth. Howard's search is also Wenders' search for American innocence-the myth that was never real, but our great filmmakers from Ford to Spielberg, understood as rhythm in the peoples' heart, an image in their minds' eye.

That's why color is so important to Don't Come Knocking.

Through gorgeous visual explicitness, Wenders creates a world that exaggerates Howard's dilemma as a wayward son, father and national figure. (Like his peers Fassbinder and Herzog, Wenders is one of the great trinity of German color Expressionists.) Ironically, Don't Come Knocking's highly stylized look also conveys the full ontological sense of life lived.

The real world and art (including the artifice of Shepherd's language with its mythic/mundane emotional clashes between Howard and his mother, wife and two estranged children) are experienced simultaneously on the same plane.

Edging into Edward Hopper Americana and back to "reality," there's none of the absurdist obscurantism that makes Shepherd's plays pall onstage. This must be an unconscious homage to Robert Altman's 1985 film Fool For Love, which unleashed Shepherd's art into wide, bright canvases. Altman's aesthetic has been forgotten for 21 years, but Wenders rediscovers it.

Wenders, once an art house darling, has lost favor just when his Yankee passion has bloomed. Last year, his poignant 9/11 film Land of Plenty was ignored because it was about reconciliation not blue state/red state antagonism. Don't Come Knocking should open everyone's eyes.