WIM, NO VIGOUR

REVIEWED - DON'T COME KNOCKING: IN 1984 Wim Wenders deservedly received the Palme d'Or at Cannes for the haunting, moving and visually powerful Paris, Texas, based on a Sam Shepard screenplay in which a distraught man is reunited with his son and goes in search of his wife, writes Michael Dwyer

Wenders and Shepard have renewed their collaboration for this modern western, which taps into cinema's recent preoccupation with fathers finding lost sons. Lightning, however, fails to strike twice.

Shepard doubles as leading actor on the new film, playing an actor, Howard Spence, celebrated for his cowboy roles and working on a western in Monument Valley when he flees the set. The notion that an actor can have a thriving career as a movie star these days while working primarily in westerns is the first of the film's implausible assumptions.

The next comes when Spence impulsively pays a visit to his mother (Eva Marie Saint) after a 30-year absence, and another in her casual revelation that a former lover of Spence's phoned all those years ago to say she had a child by him.

Conveniently, that woman (Jessica Lange) happens to work in the same Montana bar where they first met. In another neat coincidence, Spence's son (Gabriel Mann) is right there singing on stage and sounding like Roy Orbison. Meanwhile, a detective (Tim Roth) has been hired by the film company to get Spence back on the set. And there are recurring shots of a young wanderer named Sky (Sarah Polley) cradling - and talking to - an urn that holds her mother's ashes.

None of these overlapping narrative strands is satisfactorily developed in the movie's whimsical and irritatingly vague screenplay, and while Spence is set up as a supposedly enigmatic character, Shepard's performance is merely blank and self-conscious. There is compensation in the movie's consistently handsome landscape compositions.