A marvelous cast, including Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange and Eva Marie Saint, can’t overcome a dust-dry script in this Western.
By: Bob Brown
In this quiet film by Wim Wenders and actor/playwright Sam Shepard, the American West is a mesa incognita. Its beautiful, inscrutable barrenness is a plain on which Americans, like Shane, are often untethered and psychically adrift.
The inspired opening shot encapsulates the entire theme of the movie. We peer out from black space through two eyeholes, framing a turquoise sky dotted with cloud puffs. It’s as if we’re viewing heaven from inside a mask. Who is this masked man? Who is this masked being? As the surroundings emerge into light, we see that the holes are openings in two natural stone bridges, cut through rock in the Utah desert.
Under one bridge, a cowboy gallops away toward the horizon. That cowboy is aging actor Howard Spence (Shepard), who is escaping a Western movie set, Phantom of the West. The producers, frantic not to lose time, try to film around his unexpected absence, while a detective, Sutter (Tim Roth), is sent to track him and return him to fill the contract.
Spence dis-Spences with his cowboy regalia and horse at an abandoned railroad whistle stop and proceeds by foot and bus to Elko, Nev. There, his mother (Eva Marie Saint), who hasn’t seen him for decades, takes him in as if he’s been gone a mere two weeks. Spence has no plans and only a vague idea of why he’s here, if it isn’t in a bottle or with a one-night stand.
His mother’s suggestion that a woman in Butte, Mont., had been asking about him sets Spence off on another chase to find the missing piece in that puzzle of his life. Doreen (Jessica Lange), a Butte waitress with whom he had an affair 30 years earlier, is surprised to see him show up in town. So is their son, Earl (Gabriel Mann), whose talent as a singer has not saved him from the woman-abusing, self-destructive lifestyle that mirrors Howard’s own youth. Howard’s arrival opens Earl’s flood of pent-up anger.
But a mysterious, serene young woman, Sky (Sarah Polley), has been shadowing Howard all the way to Butte, cradling a sky-blue urn of her recently deceased mother’s ashes. She tries to confront Howard, who resists being pried open, even while he probes others for answers.
Viewers who know and love Wenders’ earlier work, especially Paris, Texas (another Shepard/Wenders collaboration) and Wings of Desire, will approach this oddly inert Western with the right frame of mind. This summary of events and the trailer to the film suggest a lot of action and humor, which one might expect in a contemporary Western. However, the proof is in the pudding. Thin, even empty dialogue and generous silences spread out to a little more than two hours, making this a long sit.
Residents of the real Elko and Butte may be surprised to see that the vibrant, forward-looking Western towns they portray on their Web sites are really decaying, sleepy bumps in the desert, where silent cowpokes are glued to the bar-rail. The towns’ byways look as if Edward Hopper painted them on a bet. The point is, it’s a movie about loneliness and disconnection and that search for a rooted place. We’re either restless and unsettled or we settle for what we have.
In production notes to the film, Shepard talks about core ideas from which the script evolved. "It’s about estrangement more than anything," he says. "It’s about this strange American sadness that I find, the alone-ness they feel. We don’t know each other in America, we don’t even know who we are, we just don’t. I’m haunted by that American character and that strange, strange lack of identity."
Europeans love to see a swaggering, cock-sure, bullying America exposed this way. In several scenes, a character spouting banalities is unsubtly framed by a steel-tower from which flutters the stars and stripes. Many Americans are not likely to be as intrigued by what seems old news. And portraying ennui does not entertain. For the price of a movie ticket, we rootless, un-self-realized Americans have the unalienable right not to be bored further. We want entertainment from movies, an escape from our emptiness. We seek amusement as antidote. Sky remarks to Doreen that she always wanted to be in the movie reality rather than the real one.
The cast is marvelous, especially Mr. Shepard and Ms. Polley, as are cinematography by Franz Lustig (a German eye) and music by T-Bone Burnett (an American ear). But all this cannot hold audiences riveted enough to keep them in their seats. Events proceed at the pace of ore-mining machinery rusting. Ironically, it’s Mr. Shepard’s dust-dry script, with its predictable lines, its characters’ unexplained outbursts, that sinks this desert ship in the end. There’s a nice, ironic and completely unbelievable resolution. But by that time, many audience members will have given up and ridden off into the sunset.
Rated R. Contains language and brief nudity.