Land Of Plenty Wim Wenders 2

It's diverting enough, sure, Wenders's post-9/11 movie starring John Diehl and Michelle Williams as renegades in an "all bets are off" Los Angeles landscape. But what's the point here, really? Two hours worth of paranoia being set up for preaching and lessons on equality? A wacky road-trip movie? The novelty and inexplicability of Michelle Williams as a brunette pseudo-Jew? Land of Plenty is all these things as more. Williams is our elfin heroine Lana, newly arrived in L.A. from Israel, encamped at a ghetto mission in the inner city due to the largesse of her missionary father's friend Henry (Wendell Pierce). Lana is possibly the only person ever to stay in a ghetto flophouse and manage to find a stable broadband connection for her iBook while listening to her iPod and smoking American Spirits. This spunky little missionary's mission is to find her uncle Paul, who unfortunately has become a paranoid independent paramilitary freak in her long separation from him, the victim of a defoliant called "Agent Pink" that's scrambled his mind and gotten him a hard-on for sussing out suspicious looking Arabs. The pair of Lana and Paul (played here by Diehl as a totally low-rent Gene Hackman) traipse through a circuitous series of misadventures on the path to what Paul thinks is the cracking of a terrorist threat and what Lana thinks is just being friendly. When Paul's misguided "nothing to lose but the whole USA" attitude is shattered by the realities of people just being generally good and nice and not planning to blow up the world, the film should be over, but instead the audience is treated to half an hour or more of heart to heart revelations and even a horribly cloying visit to Ground Zero. This isn't worse than most Hollywood movies, for sure, but it is too long, and much of its length comes when the action stops and the preaching begins. Paul's quick comedown is too sudden and unconvincing; the uncle/niece bonding denouement set to sunsets, which essentially becomes a Radiohead video, is pretty unforgivable. World perspectives on the post-9/11 landscape are interesting in theory, but a film genre it does not make. (InDigEnt/Reverse Angle)