FILM - "Land of Plenty"

You can strap an American flag to the back of your dilapidated van, and you can drive it all across America, but that doesn’t make you more American. You can use your own Vietnam experience to stalk innocent yet suspicious looking Arabs, and you can use 9/11 as an excuse to hide from your own problems. Wim Wenders’ film, Land of Plenty, is all about things that you can do, but it does very little. The story of a girl trying to reconnect with her last surviving relative is drowned out by the themes of patriotic paranoia, and the story of a man trying to justify his post-war purpose comes across more as unintentional comedy than drama—the film’s choices don’t compliment the message it aims to send.

As a cast, Michelle Williams and John Diehl are fine, but Williams is fodder for the camera, and Diehl, until the final moments of the movie, isn’t more than his posturing. Once Wenders finds an excuse to stick the two together in a van—the investigation of a drive-by shooting—the two have aimless conversations that blend together as much as Land of Plenty’s landscaping does. The locations are interesting, but Wenders’ shaky, low-budget technique makes everything look artificial and his focus is too sporadic to even artistically justify the action. Even if we accept that Diehl’s character is unhinged, the film goes too far when he bursts into a funeral home, carrying a corpse, and tells the owner that he doesn’t like gurneys and is on a tight schedule. That’s the hokiest form of shock, and for a film that’s trying to be serious—a film that’s deliberately trying to make something of nothing—it’s just too much. Even the musical selections when our “hero” is hunting “suspects” could be straight out of an 80s cop show, and only serve to make the film less and less plausible. Realism and spoof don’t mix.

Perhaps it’s the dialogue, which possesses too many ‘off-the-deep-end’ monologues from Diehl, or the fact that the characters seem unconnected to what they say, but Land of Plenty just isn’t very compelling. Just as Diehl’s character ultimately discovers that the pieces of his elaborate conspiracy theory don’t add up, neither does the film, and while I’m glad he doesn’t find evidence of terrorism, I wish we’d found evidence of something substantial in Land of Plenty.