End game

Wim shows new vigor in Violence

by Peter Keough

THE END OF VIOLENCE. Directed by Wim Wenders. Written by Wenders and Nicholas Klein. With Bill Pullman, Andy MacDowell, Gabriel Byrne, Loren Dean, Traci Lind, Daniel Benzali, K. Todd Freeman, John Diehl, Pruitt Taylor-Vince, Peter Horton, and Sam Fuller. A Metro Goldwyn Meyer Films release. At the Avon Friday and Saturday at midnight.

Had The Game been made by a director of genius instead of a pretentious hack like David Fincher, it might have resembled something like Wim Wenders's The End of Violence. The story is much the same: a fabulously wealthy and powerful man gets entangled in a network of malevolent, omniscient, seemingly omnipotent powers -- and in his quest to escape and learn the truth, he gets his come-uppance and earns redemption. The differences are many: depth versus superficiality, feeling versus effect, layers of meaning and an integrity of vision versus gimmickry and glitz. Throw out a few nagging lapses into sentimentality and portentousness and some straining of plausibility and The End of Violence marks Wenders's return to the ranks of the world's leading filmmakers.

One of the director's distinctions is the metaphorically resonant image. This film opens with the beautiful young Cat (Traci Lind) in close-up, addressing the camera about the nature of violence. An abrupt blast off-screen hurls her to the ground, crew members run to her aid, and the scene is revealed to be a stunt in a movie -- or a movie within a movie.

The violence is fake but the injury is real -- real enough to rouse the film's producer, Mike Max (Bill Pullman), a successful entertainment mogul whose forte is slick, violent thrillers, from his telecommunications cocoon. Sitting by his poolside, surrounded by computer screens downloading footage of in-production dailies, taking a televideo call from his assistant, and checking on his various financial holdings on another screen, he's both linked to and isolated from the world. Not even a cell-phone call from his wife, Paige (Andie MacDowell), to say she's leaving him can dislodge him. The threat that an injured employee might sue, on the other hand, sends him off in his tinted-windowed BMW for some hands-on diplomacy.

Yet a lawsuit is the least of Max's problems. Just before he signed off from his multimedia network, a mysterious 300-page classified government document had been e-mailed to him. Its import looms ominously when two Heckyl and Jekyll thugs kidnap him en route to the hospital. In a lunar wasteland next to a vast, abandoned cloverleaf, they buffoonishly argue about the wisdom of following their employers' orders to kill him.

Cut to the next morning and a battered Max awakens unable to remember how he survived. All has been observed, meanwhile, by Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne), a NASA scientist whose computerized system of hidden cameras and satellite surveillance allows him to watch anyone, anywhere, in Los Angeles. Holed up in a beehive of video monitors in the old Griffith Park Observatory (a reference to Rebel Without a Cause, as is Wenders's casting of his old crony, veteran director Sam Fuller, in a cameo role as Bering's father), he finds his complacency dissolving as he replays he crime in greater and greater detail, until the image disintegrates, à la Blow-Up, into video snow.

As in many Wenders films (The American Friend, The State of Things), The End of Violence sends two men off in a quest to come to terms with each other -- in this case, though, neither is fully aware of the other's existence. Taking refuge with a party of Mexican gardeners, soulless media fat cat Max returns, perhaps too patly, to the earth. Bering grows attached to a Salvadoran widow (Marisol Padilla Sanchez) and her daughter (Aymara de Llana), whom his shadowy boss has assigned to him as a housekeeper for the observatory. Inexorably, they draw together, the purveyor of illusory violence and the observer of real crime, in a meeting that will be the salvation and the downfall of both.

The End of Violence may be Wenders's most complexly and rigorously plotted films, with stray story threads involving Paige, who takes on Max's ruthless-honcho role in his absence, and "Doc" Rock, a movie-smitten detective who pursues Max's case, as well as the enigmatic Cat. What saves the movie from being contrived and schematic is Wenders's shimmering imagery (much influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni), his tone of brooding levity (picked up by most of the cast, except the brittle MacDowell), and an unexpected sense of humor -- a scene in which Max tries to negotiate with his captors using the art of the deal and one in which he eludes federal agents through the "invisibility" of his gardener disguise are especially apt. Mostly Wenders avoids the temptation to preach; The End of Violence is not a message but a meditation, a look at the possibility that the greatest act of violence might be the act of observation itself.