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Wim Wenders’s new film, shot on digital equipment, sees this immensely talented and restless filmmaker in full stretch; indeed, it is one of his finest pieces of work. Wenders seems to excel at intense creative outbursts – the low-budget film was written and shot in forty days – but there is no evidence of the rushed production in the finished 35mm transfer, which looks as visually sumptuous as any of his previous films. More importantly, it has a different kind of urgency behind it, perhaps born out of the psyche of contemporary America, a landscape that has long captivated him. Wenders has explored this fascination in a succession of masterpieces, from The American Friend to The State of Things and Paris, Texas. Bringing the sensibility of an outsider to bear, he has displayed an unparalleled ability to cut to the core of the American experience. In Land of Plenty, he achieves this through the eyes of a young woman who, after years of living in Israel, returns to the United States to search for her only living relative, the brother of her deceased mother. Penniless, armed only with her winning optimism and the fearlessness born of youth, Lana (Michelle Williams) ends up living in a mission in downtown Los Angeles, the “hunger capital of America;” there she sets out to find her reclusive Uncle Paul (John Diehl), an obsessive loner fixated on weeding out people he thinks are dangerous to the state. This paranoid Vietnam vet roams the city in a battered van filled with surveillance equipment. When the two finally meet, their lives overlap and intersect, taking us in strange and surprising directions. Wenders depicts America after September 11, 2001 with uncommon sensitivity and insight. Paranoia and fear rub shoulders with a sense of discovery and reconciliation, providing a complex and moving look at a country that sees itself as under siege while ignoring some of the deeper problems closer to home. Never reductionist or simplistic, Land of Plenty is a penetrating and knowing portrait of a country from a man who has spent much of his life working through his relationship with the place that “colonized his subconscious” when he was a youngster. - Piers Handling
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