* Note: This post is so full of spoilers it’s almost ridiculous – so only read the first paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet.  It’s also more of a personal review than I might otherwise write, mostly because ‘Paris, Texas’ has been resonating deeply with me since I first saw it about 15 years ago.  And finally, the photo credit: some images below are courtesy of the fine folks at the Criterion Collection.

I used to think that Thomas Merton, that earthy paragon of real life mysticism, who left this world too soon, was too wise to have lived in the twentieth century. But then I saw his character pop up in Robert Redford’s excellent little horror film Quiz Show and realised my mistake – his was a profoundly modern spirituality, with the gift of connecting ancient truth claims with contemporary reality, just what we need in these troubled times. Merton says that no one can find true life ‘unless you have risked your mind in the desert’. There’s something about the truth of Sam Shepard’s writing in Paris, Texas, available now in a classy Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray edition that leads me to believe Shepard must be familiar with Merton, and not just because it’s about a man wandering in the kind of desert that has real sand and baking sun.

Thomas Merton

This movie is about that most common of modern malaises (and my soapbox) – community breakdown, but before we get to that, let’s have a moment’s silence in honour of great opening title sequences…This one is red on black, and somehow fits right in with the burning drama of one man’s broken heart, and the starkness of what happens when people break faith with each other.

Whoever coined the phrase ‘the desert of the real’ (and I’m pretty sure Morpheus got it from someone else) may have stolen it from this movie, which opens with exceptionally beautiful shots of a lonely man appearing out of nowhere in a barren landscape, watched by a hawk. The metaphor is not strained, as we’re gradually made aware that this man is troubled by how deep the talons of his past have sunk into his soul.

He almost looks like a cartoon character – evocative of the Road Runner’s nemesis, Wile E Coyote (after a nervous breakdown), then when we see his face in close up, we realise that it’s Harry Dean Stanton and know that his story must be even worse than that poor animated wolf’s repeated inglorious end. It isn’t long before he’s on a hospital gurney, looking like Jesus. Wile E Coyote, Harry Dean Stanton, and Jesus – Wim Wenders’ Holy Trinity. Stanton’s character Travis is mute, unlike the guy in real life (especially if you go to see him play with his jazz combo in L.A.’s Mint night club on a Saturday night – the illustrious man has what I might generously call an ‘interesting’ sense of what singing is, but he certainly runs a tight band). His face is heart-breaking for the audience, and his character – when he looks in a mirror he has to run away; and I wonder if that experience is closer to home for more of us than would like to admit. Something BAD has happened to him, as he says – ‘A lot can happen to a man in four years. All kinds of trouble’. And his experience has made him different – his shoes are ‘one size bigger’, but that’s just the tip of his iceberg; we’re watching a dead man walking, trying to find out if he can ever go home, staring into the long distance, searching for ‘her’, or freedom from the past. Which, I suppose, is what all of us, to some degree, at some points in our lives, are looking for.

So, anyway, his brother comes to pick him up, showing both real grace (he’d rather have him confess to horrible misdeeds than to say nothing) and an aptitude for making Travis feel worse about himself (he has the perfect wife and work and wealth, while Travis has nothing but the past). In the early scenes between them, we see how brothers – whether biological or spiritual – can unwittingly bring both love, and a sense of competition. Travis joins his movie namesake on a journey inward, into his own heart of darkness. And we’re privileged to join him. We follow him to where he meets and bonds with the son who is too young to remember him, and we discover that Something Bad happened to break their relationship. It’s mysterious, but not a mystery film; it’s set in the west, but it’s not a western; it’s funny in places, but it’s not a comedy – Paris, Texas is well nigh uncategorisable, if indeed such a word exists.

We see that Travis owns a piece of land, but he says he can’t remember why he bought it. This made me think of how we sometimes get to the stage of forgetting why we did certain things that were important in the past, but not anymore, lost in the mists of time. Of course, buying fields is an honourable biblical activity, whether those that host pearls of great price, or hold the dead bodies of broken traitors. Maybe Sam Shepard was thinking of such plots of land when he wrote this. There’s something about land in the history of religion and identity that resonates with the deeper emotions of the human spirit, so it’s easy to understand how Travis’ plot gives him dignity, in spite of it being little more than a small patch of dust bowl. Aside from the land, we discover that Travis has also lost the love of his life, who – thanks be to God! – is played by Nastassja Kinski at her most realistically beautiful. The film paints the depth of their love by screening an old home movie, the camera dancing round them as they play on the beach with their son. This is one of the great cinematic scenes of what true love is really like – the audience may resonate with, or feel envious toward the way the characters touch each other’s faces and lips. The son says ‘Is that my mom?’, and Travis replies, ‘It’s not really her, it’s only her in a movie’, probably the most appropriate answer, for in a sense this scene, this film, is about the power of cinema to touch us. Travis and the boy travel to meet the mother, who is working in a kind of brothel for people who don’t touch each other. Travis talks to her through a screen, like a bank teller to a customer. A long scene ensues where Travis breaks our hearts with the story of their love and how it broke; he retells how their affair ended:

He just lay there in bed and listened to her scream…he didn’t feel anything anymore, all he wanted to do was sleep. He wished he were far away in a deep vast country where nobody knew him.
The two lovers are relating through a screen, which is not unlike how this generation uses computers to relate – this reminds me that we need to take care that we don’t stop touching each other. Travis is letting her go by telling her of his love, but that he realises he cannot be an adequate father to their child; the regret for things past, and how dependent love can trap is palpable. They have to turn away from each other to communicate the deepest thoughts, and the scene is so uncomfortable that I wanted to turn away from the screen, too. And we, the audience, become so caught up in the story of their love that we want the closure of them ending up together – which I suppose represents our desire to forgive them both for their failures, for being too much like us, really.

There are so many riches in this film, from the evocation of fatherhood with a dad having fun with his kid by walking backwards down the street, to Ry Cooder’s music which is so good it should be allowed to speak for itself, to the drive in bank that somehow looks like a spaceship, to Robby Muller’s poetic use of colour (red for lifeblood, which eventually moves from the background to consuming everything at the moment of redemption), to the lifetime of pain that is etched onto Harry Dean Stanton’s face. As we travel along with Travis, the film provokes us to think about the injustice of the US healthcare system, how owing a little bit of land can grant dignity, and it manages to evoke how small-town America actually feels. This is not a film to escape into, but one that is more real than most about brokenness and suffering – just like family life. It speaks of the resurrection of a dormant soul, and is a good model of what I might call ‘holistic non-closure’; by which I mean it is honest about the loose ends that we often find ourselves with.

The strangest moment in Paris, Texas has Travis pass by a man on a bridge, shouting shibboleths at the interstate traffic below, like the war veterans we have all seen in urban USA: ‘There will be no safety zone’, rhymes his portent of doom, and Travis quickly passes by, perhaps so as not to be ‘infected’ by whatever demon has possessed this brother. But there is a look of recognition between them.  Earlier, Travis tries to drive in the right direction after getting lost, and indicates the antidote to such meta-pessimism, and this may be Paris, Texas’ greatest gift to us, the somewhat broken, somewhat fixed, work-in-progress audience:

‘I don’t know where I turned off, it didn’t have a name…but I can find our way out again’

The prophet on the bridge may sound too close to home when he says ‘there will be no safety zone’; maybe that’s where you or I feel ourselves to be right now, or where we will be by the end of any particular day. We may not know where we turned off the road, but we can find our way out again. There is a safety zone for the broken.  The film ends with mother and son reunited, and Travis bathed in a green light – almost like he’s going to be taken to space. It’s a fresh beginning, and he allows himself a satisfied smile – he has forgiven himself, done something right, and perhaps will again. Surely this is the meaning of redemption – not what we’ve done, but how we respond to it when we experience the grace of another chance? If so, Wenders and Sheperd’s film is worth our time and attention. It’s a slow journey, but it might just change your direction.

The Criterion Collection edition of ‘Paris, Texas’ features a very strong new transfer, which does full justice to the unusual colour scheme; there’s a genuinely fascinating and endearing audio commentary from Wenders, whose gravelly, meditative voice produces sounds like those of a happily mellowed philosopher, and is willing to make admissions of the kind ‘before ‘Paris, Texas’, I wasn’t all that confident as a storyteller, and all my films were too long’. Wenders says that the film’s imagery is rooted in ‘the overall effect of the American cinema worldwide’, but the interviews on the disc suggest it works both ways – this was a US-German co-production, and the use of German and French actors lends a degree of authenticity to the otherworldly story. A couple of interviews with Wenders and collaborators Allison Anders and Claire Denis make him appear to be the most magnanimous team player you could ever hope to work with; and a typically elegant booklet of essays. It’s a quietly beautiful edition of a magnificent film.

Mick Innes as ‘John’ in ‘The Insatiable Moon’, Ponsonby, New Zealand, December 2009

*For the next couple of weeks I’m in New Zealand and will be blogging about the production of ‘The Insatiable Moon’, a movie based on Mike Riddell’s novel.

I’m in Ponsonby’s red light district – the portable gazebos we’re using for shade and comfortable eating are the colour of healthy scarlet; appropriate enough, given that today we turn to one of the most troubling scenes in the movie – a scene in which the hidden shame felt by a character leads to disaster. Everyone’s focused on the task in hand: to portray an awful event as truthfully as possible, without exploiting the audience’s emotions, nor denying the fact that human sorrow is real, and touches to us all. If we’re lucky, we might have an Arthur in our lives, someone who sees through the superficial mores of our culture, resists its car rally speed, and offers a human connection in the midst of the awful things that come to us, hopefully only a few times in a full life.

Mick Innes was our featured actor this morning, and it can’t be easy to do what the script requires of him – I don’t want to give too much away, but for instance, he had to be very cold and hold his breath for a long time today. I met Mick last week at his home, an amazing little place furnished with items reclaimed from the street and elsewhere – it’s one of the most character-filled abodes I’ve ever been; and Mick one of the warmest human beings. You know when people talk about someone having a twinkle in their eye? Mick’s one of them – his face may be lined from what I presume include the vagaries of being an actor; but his smile is overwhelming; his coffee welcoming, and despite his passion for sustainable home improvement, there’s nothing recycled about his performance. Trust me. You have not seen the character he plays – called John in the movie – on screen before. He will make you angry and cry at the same time. His character stands for all the people marginalized by their mistakes, and dehumanized by their community; and as a consequence not allowed to live. Mick plays him beautifully; and seeing him do it is a privilege for me as a writer used to only brining a critical eye to bear on a film once it’s made.

This has been the most illuminating aspect of being in the environs of ‘The Insatiable Moon’ – on the one hand it’s an obvious thing to say that critics and film-makers are two sides of a coin; we need each other, but we’re not always very good at communicating with each other. The reasons are fairly simple – each of us may be considered to have a vested interest in outdoing the other, but usually this either produces unhealthy cynicism rather than the kind of creative competition that we’re all supposed to believe is the nexus at which great art emerges; or, more likely, we just don’t talk to each other at all. Warren Beatty asked Pauline Kael for notes while he was making ‘Reds’ – a magnificent film that seems to get better with age – but she went back to New York soon enough; even a great director and the then most respected critic in the English language couldn’t find a way to make it work. So I’m reticent about overstating just what a film critic is doing on a film set (and while our director knows what she’s doing, I can face the reality that I am not Pauline Kael)…

Maybe it can suffice to say that I’m more convinced than ever that film-makers and film critics are, when we’re at our best, on the same side. We both want cinematic art to tell the truth; we want to share stories to the world (or whoever will watch) that reveal something that no one else has seen before in the way that we see it; we want the curtain to rise at whatever megaplex, art house or out house we’re in, and for something of surpassing quality to appear in front of our eyes. That’s not too much to ask, is it? In that light, I’d love to hear from you, the Insatiable Moon blog reader about your own thoughts of just what this surpassing quality in movies is – what are the transcendent moments of cinema for you? And what performances have granted you access to a world of compassion that made you want to change your life?

Ill add a few more cents-worth with a brief evocation via the following stills:

Chaos Indeed

One of the questionable delights of Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’, which we still haven’t seen at The Film Talk due to those oh-so-frustrating regional distribution patterns, is the appearance of a demonic fox who enlightens the audience with the motto: ‘Chaos Reigns’.  And so it does, in Trier’s universe, this time round (you never can tell with Lars whether he’s joking or serious; whether he believes in the world of ‘Breaking the Waves‘ which endorses eternal life and the healing of all wounds; or ‘Dogville’, where even grace gives up).  Speaking of dogs, and foxes, the ominous vulpe inspired a rumination on the cinema’s tendency to turn animals into representations of ourselves.  Hence Tuesday’s Top Five List - which, if you, dear reader, like it enough may become a sporadically regular feature of TFT.

The Top Five Anthropomorphised Movie Animals (and What They Represent)

5 (tie): The Dog in ‘Short Cuts’ (1993), the Cat in ‘The Long Goodbye’ (1973)

Tim Robbins’ stressed cop character in Altman’s sprawling Los Angeles slice-of-postmodern-angst is the existential opposite of Elliot Gould’s private detective and Lebowski antecedent.  Robbins spends most of the movie trying to lose the yapping puppy, one more responsibility for a married father who doesn’t want the weight of being a parent or monogamous; his treatment of the dog is a mirror of how he feels about everything – including himself: disposable.  On the other hand, Marlowe’s cat might just be the only thing in the film that he treats like a human; or at least the character he treats with the most kindness; in his feline roommate, you see the projection of Marlowe’s own psyche – as the cat emotes, so does he: ‘It’s OK with me’

(click here for our interview with Mr. Elliot Gould himself)

4: The object of our violence, the projected enemy that justifies our behaviour, the derivative of ancient Babylonian myth, the poor guy who was just looking for something to eat but couldn’t fin it because we humans have abused nature by over-fishing in the deep sea, yes, it’s Bruce from Massachussetts. Perhaps you could say that he needs some training in non-violent conflict resolution; but don’t we all?

3: In his (or her – can anyone tell me the right gender?) first on-screen appearance, Babe was known for little more than apeing his canine colleagues by herding sheep; by the time the (hugely under-rated; no less than the late Gene Siskel called it his favorite film of the year) sequel was released, so much metaphorical resonance was being thrown onto the porker that it wasn’t entirely clear whether director George Miller intended the character as a stand in for Jesus or Eve; maybe both; maybe the pig is supposed to exegete the dual nature of being human – landing as we do somewhere between sacred and profane.  Whatever’s going on here, ‘Pig in the City’ is a much more thoughtful film than its marketing or audience suggested; even with the slapstick Mickey Rooney scary clown bits.

2: Youk and Bart the bears in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s ‘The Bear‘.  What an incredible film – my own sense of wonder placed on the screen in the form of ursa minor – the cutest man-killer you’ve ever seen in a fully-rounded story of the life cycle; one that makes you want to be nicer to other people because its central character – a bear for goodness’ sake – is already kinder than you are.

1: Now, given that on Tuesdays we only have room for a Top Five, there wasn’t space for me to include other favorite cinematic animal-as-representation-of-the-human-psyche moments, such as Jiminy Cricket as the conscience of a whole generation of American children, Balloo the Bear as the fun uncle we’re all trying to be, Moby-Dick as the superego of a guy too big for his boots, Doug the Dog in ‘Up’ as the expression of what we’d all like our dogs to really be thinking, or the horses in ‘Andrei Rublev’ as a reason to stay alive when cataclysmically depressed: they are, in short, beauty itself.

But for our purposes, and this is probably no surprise to regular readers, the prize has got to go to a mildly neurotic amphibian, for whom holding it together for everyone else is a life’s work, whom we first saw on television, but gets more of a chance to shine in his movies.  If every stage show, political party or, dare I say it, film podcast had a Kermit behind the scenes to figure out how to manage being alive, maybe we’d be making music as good as Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem too.  More than that: he may be a frog, but HE CAN GO PLACES FAST.

So – anyone got a suggestion for a wiser anthropomorphised movie animal than Kermit?

You know Henry Gibson.  He’s one of those character actors who beefed up everything he was in, and indelibly so.  Fully worthy of Jett’s appellation ‘an OTG actor’ (no matter how bad the movie, when he’s on screen, your reflex is to say ‘Oh Thank God’).   You can’t imagine ‘Magnolia’ without his Luciferian bar-loiterer Thurston Howell, stirring William H Macy to humiliate himself with his unrequited love Brad (evoking the sinister sliminess of Richard Burton in ‘The Medusa Touch‘, Gibson here seemed to invest his voice with supernatural powers); ‘The Blues Brothers’ would be poorer (and the climactic, ridiculous chase sequence much less funny) without his absurd white supremacist; and, despite ‘Nashville‘s status as a fully ensembled ensemble, it is his character, Haven Hamilton, who sings the overture and facilitates the coda.

He helped anchor work as various and memorable as ‘The Long Goodbye’ (which Elliott Gould told us recently may have a sequel on the way), and Joe Dante’s wonderful homage to 50s kitsch sci-fi ‘Innerspace’.  And who else played two different guest roles on both ‘The Fall Guy’ and ‘MacGuyver’  (with character names like Meriwell Cooper, Milton Bach, and my personal favourite, Pinky Burnette; not to mention Reilly O’Reilly (you heard that right) in something called ‘The Luck of the Irish.  To be sure.)  He also made it into ‘The Littlest Hobo’, which happens to have been my favourite show when I was eight years old.  In one of those eyebrow raising coincidences that actors of his generation seem to carry in their pockets, he got his stage name from Jon Voigt, an old roommate, who, along with others who have spoken to the press since his death on Monday, seems to have shared the view that he was one of the kindest men they knew; and, yes, it was a deliberate attempt to evoke the name of the author of ‘A Doll’s House’.

But I’ll remember him most for ‘Magnolia’, in the dark velvet smoking jacket, sneering at all-comers, laying down the gauntlet to the universe, saying No to grace.  He clearly hasn’t seen the weather forecast.  ‘Magnolia’, of course, is soaked with references to the numbers ’2′ and ’8′, indicating the 8th chapter, 2nd verse of the book of Exodus (in case you haven’t been doing scripture memorisation lately, that’s a sentence about the potential for certain amphibious creatures to interrupt your day, make you look, and maybe even wise, up).  If memory serves, the introduction to the published shooting script for ‘Magnolia’ has Paul Thomas Anderson saying that he got the biblical reference from Henry Gibson, meaning that he had much more of a hand in that movie than simply sitting devilish and asking for another drink.

‘It is a dangerous thing to confuse children with angels’, says Thurston Howell, egging Macy’s Quiz Kid Donnie Smith to shred a little bit more of his ego; ‘It’s not’, says Donnie later, throwing up his embarrassment, not knowing that tonight will be a turning point toward his own redemption, and perhaps the end of his loneliness.  It is, however, a dangerous thing to confuse Henry Gibson with nothing more than a thesp-for-hire.  You can’t imagine anyone else playing his roles.  Rest in Peace.

[Image above from Bass Harp.]