Reunion of the writing and directing team of Paris, Texas, Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders, for a similarly slow-moving road movie, which seems to be set in an alternative universe where there still exists in the present day, much as it existed half a century earlier, a class of people known as "Western actors," i.e., actors predominantly identified with Westerns. One of these might then be branded in the tabloids as the "Western Bad Boy," to set him apart from his better-behaved brethren, for his promiscuous ways with women, drugs, and liquor. (In a departure from Paris, Texas, Shepard himself plays the protagonist, an interesting performance that involves a lot touching, stroking, rubbing of his face, as if he needed to confirm constantly his corporeality.) And such a man, too, might then choose to abscond on horseback from the set of an oater called Phantom of the West in Moab, Utah. To shake any pursuers, he swaps clothes with a grizzled old codger, throws away his cellphone and credit cards, and seeks temporary refuge with the mother he hasn't seen in decades (Eva Marie Saint), who will give direction and purpose to his flight when she shares the gossipy tidbit that he has a grown son he never knew about (Gabriel Mann), a moody rock-and-roller with a Fifties ducktail, whose rebellious nature hasn't taken him more than a stone's throw from the restaurant run by his mother (Jessica Lange) in Butte, Montana. By the luckiest chance, a daughter he also never knew about (Sarah Polley), by a separate mother, simultaneously roams the streets of Butte, lugging her mother's ashes in an urn. The entire affair -- a Shepard's pie of restlessness, rootlessness, and unseverable blood ties -- is saved from total silliness by Wenders's cool command of tempo and tone. (Though he'd have done well to rein in Lange in her emotional dam-burst on a public sidewalk.) This filmmaker, the most durable of the New German filmmakers of the Seventies, requires a locale more than he requires a script. The evocative Western landscapes, the ribbony roadways, the cascade of colored lights in a small-town Nevada casino, the ghostly streets of Butte -- all these are more real, more beckoning, than the human story. Wenders truly settles into a place, occupies it, observes it, absorbs it. Tim Roth, Fairuza Balk, George Kennedy. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
Rated R
