Paris, Texas

US (1984): Drama
Roger Ebert Review: 4.0 stars out of 4
150 min, Rated R, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc
Directed by Wim Wenders and produced by Don Guest. Screenplay by Sam
Shepard.
Review
A man walks alone in the desert. He has no memory, no past, no future. He
finds an isolated settlement where the doctor, another exile, a German, makes
some calls. Eventually the man's brother comes to take him back home again.
Before we think about this as the beginning of a story, let's think about it very
specifically as the first twenty minutes of a movie. When I was watching PARIS,
TEXAS for the first time, my immediate reaction to the film's opening scenes
was one of intrigue: I had no good guesses about where this movie was
headed, and that, in itself, was exciting, because in this most pragmatic of
times, even the best movies seem to be intended as predictable consumer
products. If you see a lot of movies, you can sit there watching the screen and
guessing what will happen next, and be right most of the time.
That's not the case with PARIS, TEXAS. This is a defiantly individual film, about
loss and loneliness and eccentricity. We haven't met the characters before in a
dozen other films. To some people, that can be disconcerting; I've actually read
reviews of PARIS, TEXAS complaining because the man in the desert is German,
and that another character is French. Is it written that the people in movies
have to be Middle Americans, like refugees from a sitcom?
The characters in this movie come out of the imagination of Sam Shepard, the
playwright of rage and alienation, and Wim Wenders, a West German director
who often makes "road movies," in which lost men look for answers in the
vastness of great American cities. The lost man is played this time by Harry
Dean Stanton, the most forlorn and angry of all great American character
actors. We never do find out what personal cataclysm led to his walk in the
desert, but as his memory begins to return, we learn how much he has lost. He
was married, once, and had a little boy. The boy has been raised in the last
several years by Stanton's brother (Dean Stockwell) and sister-in-law (Aurore
Clment). Stanton's young wife (Nastassja Kinski) seems to have disappeared
entirely in the years of his exile. The little boy is played by Hunter Carson, in
one of the least affected, most convincing juvenile performances in a long time.
He is more or less a typical American kid, despite the strange adults in his life.
He meets Stanton and accepts him as a second father, but of course he thinks

of Stockwell and Clment as his family. Stanton has a mad dream of finding his
wife and putting the pieces of his past back together again. He goes looking,
and finds Kinski behind the one-way mirror of one of those sad sex emporiums
where men pay to talk to women on the telephone.
PARIS, TEXAS is more concerned with exploring emotions than with telling a
story. This isn't a movie about missing persons, but about missing feelings. The
images in the film show people framed by the vast, impersonal forms of
modern architecture; the cities seem as empty as the desert did in the opening
sequence. And yet this film is not the standard attack on American alienation. It
seems fascinated by America, by our music, by the size of our cities, and a land
so big that a man like the Stanton character might easily get misplaced.
Stanton's name in the movie is Travis, and that reminds us not only of Travis
McGee, the private eye who specialized in helping lost souls, but also of lots of
American Westerns in which things were simpler, and you knew who your
enemy was. It is a name out of American pop culture, and the movie is a
reminder that all three of the great German New Wave directorsHerzog,
Fassbinder, and Wendershave been fascinated by American rock music,
American fashions, American mythology.
This is Wenders's fourth film shot at least partly in America (the others were
ALICE IN THE CITIES, THE AMERICAN FRIEND, and HAMMETT). It also bears
traces of KINGS OF THE ROAD, his German road movie in which two men meet
by chance and travel for a time together, united by their mutual inability to
love and understand women. But it is better than those moviesit's his best
work so farbecause it links the unforgettable images to a spare, perfectly
heard American idiom. The Sam Shepard dialogue has a way of allowing
characters to tell us almost nothing about themselves, except for their most
banal beliefs and their deepest fears.
PARIS, TEXAS is a movie with the kind of passion and willingness to experiment
that was more common fifteen years ago than it is now. It has more links with
films like FIVE EASY PIECES and EASY RIDER and MIDNIGHT COWBOY, than with
the slick arcade games that are the box-office winners of the 1980s. It is true,
deep, and brilliant.