Paris, Texas (1984) Review

A man in a red cap walks through desert until he collapses. He has no identification and will not speak. A doctor finds a number in his pocket and calls a brother in Los Angeles who had assumed he was dead.

The 9 is for a film with the patience to withhold its subject for ninety minutes and the writing to justify the wait. Travis does not explain himself, the film does not explain him, and the explanation when it comes is delivered by the character himself to somebody who cannot see him.

What holds it back from a 10 is the middle hour, which is looser than it needs to be. The reunion with the son works and takes its time doing it, and there are stretches where the patience becomes indulgence.

Silence as Structure

Travis says nothing for the first twenty-five minutes. Not a word. His brother collects him, drives him, talks to him, and he stares out of the window.

That is an enormous risk and the film converts it into the central device. An audience given a character who will not speak spends every scene trying to read him, which means they are doing the work the dialogue would otherwise do.

Harry Dean Stanton plays it with almost no expression and total specificity. He is not catatonic. He is somebody deciding, continuously, not to say anything, and the decision is visible.

When he does begin to speak the register is strange. Flat, practical questions about small things, a childlike literalism, and an inability to address anything that matters. The recovery of speech is not a recovery of function.

Dean Stockwell does the work that makes the silence bearable. Walt is a brother who has spent four years assuming the worst, has raised the abandoned child, and is now driving a man who will not speak across several states while trying to be normal about it. His patience is the audience’s patience.

The Photograph and the Town

Travis carries a photograph of an empty lot in Paris, Texas, which he bought by mail because he believes he was conceived there.

That detail is the film’s best single idea. A man who has lost everything is holding a picture of a place he has never been, bought from a catalogue, because it represents a beginning he can locate on a map.

It also supplies the title’s joke, which is not really a joke. Paris, Texas, is a real town, and the gap between the name and the place is the same gap the character is living in.

Nothing is ever done with the lot. He does not go there and the film does not resolve it, which is correct. Some objects in a life carry meaning that never converts into an action.

The reunion with the boy is built on the same patience. Hunter does not want a father who appeared from nowhere, and the film gives them a walk home from school on opposite sides of a street, gradually matching each other’s pace, with no dialogue at all. It is the best scene in the middle hour.

Robby Muller Shot It

The photography is the reason the film looks like nothing else. Saturated reds and greens, neon against dusk, enormous skies, and interiors lit like paintings.

Wenders is a German director looking at the American southwest, and the film is unmistakably an outsider’s view. Motels, gas stations, drive-ins and freeways are photographed with an attention Americans do not give them because they are not exotic.

Ry Cooder’s slide guitar does the same work in sound. Sparse, bent, unhurried, and the pieces are short and repeated instead of developed, which leaves the landscape room.

The result is a film where you could stop on almost any frame and have an image worth looking at, which is a real achievement and also part of why the middle sags. Beauty sustains attention less well than a question does.

Muller and Wenders had worked together for over a decade by this point and the shorthand shows. Shots are held far past the point most directors would cut, and the confidence to do that comes from a photographer who knows the frame will still be interesting in four seconds.

The Peep Show

Travis finds his wife working in a booth where men speak to women through one-way glass. He can see her. She cannot see him. He sits down and tells her a story about two people, in the third person, and she gradually realizes who is talking.

It is the finest piece of writing Sam Shepard did for the screen and one of the great scenes in American film. The one-way glass is the structural device, and the third person is what makes it bearable, because neither of them could do this face to face.

Nastassja Kinski plays the recognition in stages across several minutes with almost no dialogue. She listens, then understands, then turns off the light in her booth so she can see her own reflection and speak to it, and the staging is the whole relationship.

What he confesses is jealousy that became imprisonment, a man who tied a bell to his wife’s ankle so he would know when she moved. The film has spent ninety minutes making the audience like him and delivers this without softening a word of it.

The reversal that follows is the other half. She tells her version, and it is not a contradiction but a completion, and the scene ends with both of them having said the true thing and neither of them able to do anything with it.

The Ending Is a Refusal

Travis arranges for the mother and son to be reunited in a hotel room, watches from a car park, and drives away.

That is the decision the entire film builds to and it is the hardest one available. He does not join them, does not explain himself to the boy, and does not ask for anything. He has concluded that the family works better without him in it.

The film declines to say whether he is right. There is no scene afterward, no reconciliation, and no indication of what happens to him, and the last image is a man driving into a city at night.

That refusal is why the film lasts. A version where he walks into the room exists and is a lesser film, because it would convert a story about somebody understanding what he did into a story about somebody being forgiven for it.

It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984 and did modest business, and its reputation has grown steadily since. The images have carried further than the film itself has, and a great many people know the red cap and the neon without ever having sat through the two extremely patient hours of film that are the only reason any of those images mean very much at all to the people watching them.

Should you watch Paris, Texas?

Yes, for the last thirty minutes, and the ninety before them are what make those thirty work. This is a film about a man who cannot say what he did until he is in a room where the person he did it to cannot see his face.

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