Potent pairing, paltry results. As in Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard with Don't Come Knocking, filmed in 2005 and their first reteaming since 1984's Paris, Texas.
Aiming for a leisurely pace and elegiac tone, Wenders shoots wide of both—leisurely devolves into near-paralytic and elegiac turns funereal—in this dusty tale of fading movie-western star Howard Spence (Shepard, acting his own screenplay) and his male-menopausal meandering.
After a lifetime of selfishness, boozing, screwing and tabloid headline-making, Spence skips out on a film set and heads home to Elko, Nevada, and his long-forgotten mom (Eva Marie Saint, in a spry-old-gal performance), who reveals that years before, one of his paramours called to say she'd given birth to Spence's kid. Quick as you can say Broken Flowers, he's off to Montana to look for his lost lover (Jessica Lange) and their bratty grown son (Gabriel Mann), and lay around laconically, mulling his life while trailed by a strangely ethereal young woman (Sarah Polley) and tracked by the studio bond man (a deadpan-dry Tim Roth) determined to drag Spence back to the set.
A man wallowing in his wasted existence is a compelling theme—and a more snug fit for the cerebral-friendly confines of the stage, where so much of playwright Shepard's material triumphs. But it's almost a cinematic corpse, compounded by Wenders' head-spinning 360-degree camera pans and time-compression shots that evoke a dreamlike state in a movie asking us to care about real people who are little more than sketches.
Shepard's monosyllabic aimlessness does bespeak a certain vulnerability, and Lange's performance is effective. But moviegoers likely won't come knockin' on this sleepy story's door.