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PP&P: Land of Plenty

Michelle Williams in "Land of Plenty"

At a time when the status of immigrants in our society is getting so much attention, it’s worth recalling that the history of Hollywood, which for better and worse is the mythology of the modern era, is a history shaped largely by immigrants. The business was built by studio heads in the 1920s and 1930s who were at most first-generation, and its creative side in the important years of the pre-World War II era was shaped by a flood of creative talent fleeing Europe.

For my money, there was no better observer of America in mid-century than Billy Wilder, that German emigrant whose films reflected a relentless study of his adopted home. Through the years, some of the most fascinating films about America have been made by filmmakers who were not born here, from Milos Foreman to Ang Lee.

I would not go so far as to call Land of Plenty, by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, a great film about America. But it is a film about this country in its present condition, made by an outside observer who loves it and frets over its difficulties.

Land of Plenty was written and produced in a short period of time to take advantage of an unexpected hiatus in 2003 when the film Wenders was working on temporarily shut down due to financing problems. Concerned about “poverty, paranoia and patriotism,” Wenders concocted a story that would let him explore these issues in the conflict between two characters too bound together to ignore each other.

Lana (Michelle Williams) grew up mostly in Africa and the Middle East, where her parents are missionaries. She has returned to the US for the first time in more than a decade to find her mother’s estranged brother Paul (John Diehl).

Since the events of 9/11, former Special Services officer Paul has also started to become estranged from reality, driving around Los Angeles in a beat-up van that he has outfitted as a “freelance” homeland security operation. Driving around listening to a steady diet of right-wing radio, he spies on anyone who strikes him as suspicious (i.e., dark-skinned), hoping to find a terrorist operation he can thwart.

When Lana makes contact with him, Paul avoids her, preferring to remain inside the shell he has woven for himself. She senses a way to reach him when she witnesses the death of a homeless Pakistani man she met briefly at the homeless shelter where she has been staying and working. By virtue of his head garb, the man had become the focus of Paul’s harmless but steady attention, and Lana convinces him to help her return the body to his brother, who lives in a small town up in Death Valley.

I’m a bit reluctant to describe these two characters in too much detail, because to do so would make them reek of cliché: Lana is a Christian who believes that the best preaching comes from doing good works rather than talking about them; Paul is a Vietnam veteran suffering the effects of defoliant exposure. Overly familiar as they may sound, they come alive onscreen thanks to strong performances and intelligent scripting. (The screenplay, based on Wenders’ story, was written by Michael Meredith, who made an excellent film called Three Days of Rain, updating some Chekov stories to modern Cleveland. I saw it at the Montreal Film Festival in 2003, after which it sadly seems to have disappeared.)

Despite a stagily dramatic climax and somewhat mawkish coda, Land of Plenty succeeds in small details. Like his countryman Werner Herzog, Wenders has an eye for out-of-the-way American locations, and he gets a surprising beauty out of video images transferred to 35mm film. (He says the secret is in post-production work on the color correction.) As always, he loves to shoot on the road, and there are moments here that recall the settings and moods of Wings of Desire and Paris Texas.

The online magazine Salon reports that Land of Plenty had trouble finding distribution because of a buzz after its premiere screening at the Venice Film Festival that it was an anti-American diatribe. It’s blatantly ridiculous that Wenders, one of the cinema’s great humanists, would ever make a film that was a diatribe about anything: The most negative emotion he seems capable of is disappointment. (Is there any film that makes you want to hug strangers more than Wings of Desire?) But the fact remains that this imperfect but commendable little film has been all but orphaned in the marketplace. It will play in Buffalo at the Emerging Cinema screen at the Market Arcade from Friday through Tuesday only.