Skip to main contentLuke and Andrew Wilson's The Wendell Baker Story is a lazy movie. "How lazy is it?" you ask. Why, it's so dadgum lazy that it took two years just to get out of Texas. It was the opening feature of the 2005 SXSW Festival in Austin—the same city where it was filmed—and is just now making the national theatrical circuit. There's doubtless a complicated distribution snafu behind the delay, but it would feel just as true to the spirit of the film to say that it reached El Paso and decided to take a nap.
The movie's languor is, in about equal measure, endearing and infuriating. On the one hand, it's nice to see Luke and Andrew—the handsome Wilson brother and the lunky one who played Future Man in Bottle Rocket—reunite some of Wes Anderson's regulars (Owen Wilson, Seymour Cassel) with some other graceful old actors (Kris Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton) for what amounts to a backyard cookout. But maybe it would have helped if Luke had bothered to write a script that didn't play as Bottle Rocket 2: Dignan Changes his Name to Wendell. I'm not sure if both movies used the same Texas prison as a set (I suspect they did), but almost everything else is the same: the ragtag team being played for patsies by a nefarious front organization, the beautiful Hispanic love interest, and especially the main character, a lovable innocent who never gives up on his dreams. Wendell Baker is no cynic, he's no quitter, and he's no original.
None of this makes The Wendell Baker Story a bad movie, exactly. It contains several ramshackle sequences of great humor, some pleasant sub-Andersonian peculiarities (the scene where Owen duets with Eddie Griffin on an a capella version of TLC's "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls" is a treat) and a peerless soundtrack. Sometimes these pieces converge, as when an early misunderstanding in a public restroom is scored to Ricky Nelson's "Garden Party." But these moments are too rare. Perhaps the Wilsons have taken Nelson's lyrics to heart: You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself. PG-13.
WWeek 2015