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Overrated

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This is a sort of anti-Wenders film. While most of his films are uplifting, beautiful and spiritual, _Land of Plenty_ is a brutal and unpleasant exposé of American paranoia. It's very well done, and it's frighteningly accurate. Still, I can't imagine any Americans will enjoy watching it.If you're in denial, then you will be offended by this movie (like most of the negative reviewers here). So don't bother.If you're familiar with the paranoia and bigotry that has enveloped this country then this movie will upset you, just as if you had a big wart on your nose, and someone made a film about it. So don't bother.I believe the only people who could possibly enjoy this film are objective (non-American) viewers who do not feel the shame that this movie exposes.I'm rating this film an 8 because it was well done, but I can't recommend it to anyone. It was just too excruciating for me (as it should be for all Americans who share the burden of what our country has turned into). Another film which falls into this category is _House of Sand and Fog_ which one critic called "the feel-bad movie of the year".This movie made me feel like crap. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch _Lisbon Story_ 1000 times and try to recover from this.

There's a lot to be said for a film that makes profound statements about the 9/11 attacks and its effects on Vietnam vets. Most of us were probably too shocked inside our own little bubble to realize the impact these men felt when exploding planes collapsed the twin towers. But director Wim Wenders (DON'T COME KNOCKING) pulls it off thanks to a fairly good script and even better acting by lead actors John Diehl and Michelle Williams.Never having seen Diehl in a leading role, this movie shows he's got some serious chops and can act with the best Hollywood has to offer. Equally Michelle Williams pulls off a stunningly excellent performance as the worldly but loving niece who helps Diehl discover himself all over again.The story ...Paul (John Diehl) is a Vietnam vet living in Los Angeles. He lives in a fantasy world all his own, believing that he's helping with national security by tracking suspicious looking people with his surveillance tricked-out van. He operates a camera that comes out of the van's sunroof and records activity around town.Michelle (Michelle Williams, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) is returning from Tel Aviv after years away from the States. Her mother passed away and she's trying to hook up with her last surviving relative in America: Paul. Working at a mission for the poor, she befriends many of its patrons and meets up with a withdrawn Arab-looking gentleman named Hassan (Shaun Taub, CRASH) who also happens to be one of Paul's prime suspects.Paul witnesses Hassan hauling boxes of borax and quickly learns that it is an ingredient for certain bomb materials. On high alert, Paul records everything Hassan does. This brings him closer to his niece, Michelle. But Hassan lives on the street and is eventually shot to death right in front of Paul, making him believe that someone knocked him off for sinister reasons.Michelle is beset with grief about Hassan's death and searches for one of his family members. Eventually finding one near Death Valley, she convinces Paul to drive her and the body to Hassan's brother for burial. Paul agrees in the hopes of gaining more information about who Hassan was and what he was up to.As the nexus between Paul's old Vietnam life and the new one that awaits him with Michelle begins to culminate, we see him battling bad dreams of his time in Southeast Asia but being aided and comforted by Michelle and, to his surprise, by Hassan's death and Hassan's brother.We quickly learn that Paul went down a bad trail after the 9/11 attacks, his mind sparking up old memories in order to protect itself. He lives in his van, which is his life-connection to the world now. But that will change once Michelle teaches him how to trust again.The film is touching if sometimes a bit heavy-handed in the dialogue department. We're sometimes forcibly given rather trite information about the homeless and war, but this is easily overlooked thanks to the able acting of its two main characters.

The alternative angle is looking at this movie as a study of the two main characters and their interaction. The other, obvious angle of a post-911 political statement has provoked heated exchanges in the IMDb comments, to which I would just quote the winner of the recently voted top 100 movie quotes.Despite the initial impression created by the movie makers, there isn't really that much of a story. What we have instead in the convergence (not collision) of two sharply polarized characters. 20-year-old Lana who returns to her native United States after a life in Israel since early childhood is as close to an angel as you can get. Her uncle (mother's brother) Paul, a Vietnam veteran and Agent Orange victim is not the devil. He is not even the average lunatic war hawk you might expect. For someone with his background, he appears to be in his full senses even in the paranoid-ridden surveillance exercise that has consumed his every waking (and sometimes even sleeping) thought. The interaction between these two characters and how they affect each others' thinking is the soul of the movie, the way I choose to watch it. Michelle Williams and John Diehl are marvelous.

"Land of Plenty" is a thought-provoking film. How couldn't it be? Wenders, a provocative director, taking on 9/11 and its aftermath? Truly, not to disparage Wenders, a monkey with a digital camera and a placard reading "Tell me about 9/11" could create something worth watching given the subject.In Wenders case, he has made an insular film focusing on two people, Lana (Michelle Williams) and her Uncle Paul (John Diehl), and the after effects of 9/11 upon both. Lana is a painfully naive 20 yr. old Christian who has just returned from a missionary stint in Palestine (where she witnessed 9/11) to work in a Los Angeles mission while searching for evidence justifying vehement, anti-American sentiment abroad. In her possession is a letter written by her recently deceased mom, Paul's sister. Deliverance of the letter compels here to track down her wayward uncle, the letter's addressee. Paul is in his 50s, a shell-shocked, paranoid Vietnam vet, intent on keeping this country safe from the free-roaming terrorists who are, in his eyes, ubiquitous within the City of Angels.Wenders draws these characters in such vivid Blue and Red colors that you would have to have your head up your butt not to see that they represent the mindset of Democrats (Lana) and Republicans (Paul). In fact, in various interviews, and during a Q & A after the 3/31/05 screening I attended, Wenders asserted that this film IS "a political film." Though he feels he has not made a polemical film: he has. You will be hard-pressed not to choose sides while watching the film. As for Wenders, he leaves little doubt as to his choice: true Blue.To that end, one need only take into consideration Wenders' mocking presentation of Paul as a hyper-vigilant nut case roaming L.A. in a beat-up, surveillance-equipment-crammed van in search of terrorist activity. Paul undertakes this toothless work functioning as a self-appointed renegade operative for Homeland Security, who have no connection with him. Paul's right hand man, Jimmy, is a grungy garage mechanic whose only connections to top-secret sources are Internet search engines. They bring to mind as Beavis & Butthead, with not much more at their disposal than Harriet-the-Spy in terms of fruitful resources. But for one scene showing Paul suffering the ill effects of post-war syndrome during a gripping nightmare, Wenders shows him to be something of a lunatic rube--a virtual laughing stock. Indeed, most of the movie's laughs come at Paul's expense because just about every action he undertakes furthers one's opinion of him as a maligned, pathetic xenophobe. (No doubt, if this movie finds a US distributor, most patriotic Vietnam vets will express their outrage at being presented as loose cannon extremists.) Wenders' presentation of Paul clearly displays his loathing for such Reds: the pro-war, high-angst, flag-waving, Dubbya-backing, kill'-em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em out folk who tote, and vote for, the conservative line.It's a credit to John Diehl that his intense, career-defining portrayal of Paul embellishes the shallow character created by Wenders. Diehl never allows Paul to breakdown completely, despite the various defeats he suffers, and has suffered. You want to like him for to see him overcome his burdens. He's troubled but not entirely lacking heart.As for Michelle Williams, she is god-awful as Lana. Wenders wrote the part for her, but one wonders if he did so just so that he could see her face on the big screen. With her bobbed black hair and perpetual doe-in-the-headlights countenance, she brings to mind a fifth-rate imitation of Audrey Tattou ("Amelie") and the poor man's Gweneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johannson ("Lost in Translation"). For the most part, she functions as eye candy. At other times she's a distraction. And, in one embarrassing scene--a testament to Wenders' music video work furthering my belief that he had other things in mind when he wrote the part for her--where Lana is seen in isolation wearing headphones while bopping to a tune emanating from her MP3, you beg for someone to push her off the mission's rooftop. In short, Williams fails to ACT, neither adding nuance to Lana's emotions nor any inventive idiosyncrasy to Lana's physical being. Where Diehl took what he was given and ran with it like a crazed wolverine, Williams was unable to enhance her character, instead, opting to stand around, a vapid clothes horse.Wenders' presentation of his two main characters in such unmistakable hues ends up reducing Lana and Paul to one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, relegating them to ancillary evidence supporting his messages that mental, spiritual, social and political poverty are bad, and that the USA's polemical political system, which has reduced and divided citizens into two opposing factions, sucks.The title comes from a Leonard Cohen song, "The Land of Plenty." Cohen's lyrics--And I don't really know who sent me/to raise my voice and say/May the lights in the Land of Plenty/Shine on the truth some day--influence Wenders' directional choices. He employs the song strategically throughout the film, right up to the very end where truncated lyrics: "Shine on/The Truth," float in a slate gray New York skyline above Ground Zero, as if sky-written by a passing plane.An epitaph? An invocation? A critique? A prayer?Probably, all of the above.Despite Michelle Williams' abysmal performance, the conceptual limitations inherent in the rapid creation and completion of the film and the shortcomings of Wenders' obvious one-dimensional characters and biased message, "Land of Plenty" remains a provocative film worth viewing. If for no other reason than to remind us that life ain't always pretty, even here in the land of plenty. One hopes that one U.S. distributor will have the courage to pick up the film and disseminate it nationwide. If nothing else, viewers will come away thinking about just how divisive our Red and Blue political system is and maybe, just maybe, start thinking of how to change it.