The End of Violence
First screened in March 2025
Director: Wim Wenders. Cast: Bill Pullman, Gabriel Byrne, Traci Lind, Andie MacDowell, Loren Dean, Rosalind Chao, Daniel Benzali, John Diehl, Pruitt Taylor Vince, K. Todd Freeman, Marisol Padilla Sánchez, Aymara De Llano, Nicole Ari Parker, Enrique Castillo, Sal Lopez, Ulysses Cuadra, Henry Silva, Peter Horton, Marshall Bell, Frederic Forrest, Sam Fuller, Udo Kier, Sam Phillips, O-Lan Jones, Me'shell NdegéOcello. Screenplay: Nicholas Klein (from an original screen story by Nicholas Klein and Wim Wenders). In Brief:
Credit Wenders for seeing his movie hadn't come together. Hard to see how these components could even combine.
VOR:②
Marketing at the time, even after Cannes, managed to position this as a big statement by a major filmmaker. That veneer barely clings to it now.
Wim Wenders's The End of Violence asks the bold question, What if Joel Silver were kidnapped by gunmen on the same day he got dropped by his wife, and after fleeing the bloody, self-implicating scene of his own near-assassination and needing to go incognito, he found a convenient hideout but also a new lease on community and on life by living among a crew of Latino gardeners and lawn-care workers? Through a second, initially unrelated, eventually integrated plotline, The End of Violence also asks a second bold question, which is What if Surveillance, because the late 90s?
It's hard to know what extant constituency will eye-roll harder at The End of Violence: the folks who smelled a colony of rats underneath Crash's cross-racial and multiethnic but also super-white meditation on LA anomie, or the ones who went hard on Wenders's recent Perfect Days for seeming to suggest (though I personally dispute this reading) that working-class labor offers the right, wide-eyed spiritual reset for flailing white-collar guys. To be fair, The End of Violence doesn't fully commit to that latter thesis, but it's hard to say whether that's out of a worthy ambivalence about the story's implications or just a reflection of the movie's strange narrative and thematic paralysis. Wenders has set up a glassy chess board from which a few pawns, a couple of knights, and maybe a bishop have been provisionally advanced and then nobody ever went further—despite the director re-editing the movie for structure and coherence after a cool Cannes reception. Bill Pullman's vaguely contemplative gazes from beneath his borrowed baseball cap and post-abduction scruff (he's Max, aka Joel Silver), Andie MacDowell's driftless looks and pointless laps in the pool (she's the wife who's had it), and Gabriel Byrne's haunted, icy stare (he does Surveillance) all operate the same way that portentous title does: signals of an existential or epochal or at least sentence-length idea that never coalesces.
You will notice that the characters of color, like K. Todd Freeman's rapper and Nicole Ari Parker's soulful poet and Marisol Padilla Sánchez's maid and the barely named members of the landscape crew (savor those character types!), are secondary or tertiary presences even though the movie can't drum up much interest or clarity about the ostensible protagonists. Pascal Rabaud's photography is often elegant, though in a way that's pretty without being too informative of theme or scene-level thrust, and in context, it isn't an unambiguous asset. You can at least say this for Crash's more pedestrian aesthetic: if you don't have anything coherent to say, best not to dress up your movie as something more than it is. Grade:D+
