Harry Dean Stanton, who died earlier this month, at the age of ninety-one, had the misfortune of becoming a star in a bad movie, “Paris, Texas,” and its misguided influence deformed the remainder of his career, even unto his last star turn, in “Lucky,” which comes out on Friday. “Paris, Texas,” released in 1984, is an exemplary artifact of the Reagan years, an attempt to revive what the critic Greil Marcus later called the “old, weird America,” a heartland apart from the nostalgic mythology that Reagan embodied, peddled, and perpetuated, and to reclaim the country in the name of the romantic but long-suffering eccentricity that Wim Wenders, the director, found in Stanton. The film is motivated by an idea, but Wenders laminates his idea onto his characters and settings, and freezes his actors, especially Stanton, in his narrow—and virtuous—design.
Wenders, born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1945, is an artist of paradox, a devotee of the American popular arts who thinks less in terms of stories than of myths. His subconscious has been virtually colonized by Hollywood movies and American music; he picks up their styles and moods, the myths and the icons, and his genius is to graft those myths onto, and to extrude their ubiquitous but stealthy presence from, the modern German environment, as he personally experienced it. His best work (such as “Alice in the Cities” and “Kings of the Road,” from the nineteen-seventies) draws upon his firsthand perspective to consider German political and cultural history in the light of that post-Second World War cultural infusion. He has made great films in the United States, such as the first section of “Alice in the Cities,” based on his own travels, or “Don’t Come Knocking,” from 2005, with a script and a performance by Sam Shepard, which is about something that Wenders knows well—the life and work of a filmmaker and the fusion of movie myths with a filmmaker’s identity. In contrast, “Paris, Texas,” also written by Shepard, is a series of reprocessed moods and tones in which he filters his mythologized America back onto American characters and places, resulting in a cinematic echo chamber that also echoes Hollywood’s clichéd sentimentality and offers no contrasting practical complexity. What’s more, in “Paris, Texas,” Wenders’s images—which, at their best, fuse analysis and observation, detail and abstraction—are merely graphically pure, moodily signifying their own downbeat authenticity in their romanticized alienation. Wenders doesn’t see the landscape or the towns; he sees his repertory of myths and applies them to his settings like decals. The resulting images are often eye-catching, but they disgorge their purpose in a glance and leave little to the imagination; they offer the dream of deep mystery without being in themselves mysterious.
I rewatched “Paris, Texas” recently, for the first time in many years. This time around, in the film’s early scenes, which famously show Stanton’s character, Travis, in his uneasily formal (albeit rumpled) jacket, tie, and boyish red cap, surrounded by the raw bare landscape and etched against the sky, I was struck by a strange resemblance to, or foreshadowed reminiscence of, another actor whose gesture repertory and verbal inflections form an enduring style: Jason Schwartzman. But Schwartzman, in addition to starting young, also started in “Rushmore,” a film that is rich in lived experience, that teems with observations, aphorisms, and dramatic and micro-dramatic situations of emotional complexity, range, and reach. Stanton, at the moment that he was ready to soar, was weighed down with an iconography that was neither his own nor as rich as the inner life that he pressed into its service. The best thing about “Paris, Texas” is the simple fact that Stanton is front and center throughout. But the role reduced him rather than filling him out, turning him into an icon rather than a performer.
The last movie in which Stanton starred, “Lucky,” opens tomorrow, and though it’s a generous vehicle for Stanton’s presence, it’s also a painful trivialization of it. The movie follows the line of the mythologizing of Stanton in “Paris, Texas”—but now the loner with a bleak but blanked-out past is presented as a cute old coot. The cantankerous Lucky, the man with no name, is defined by the idiosyncrasies of his routine: his morning coffee and exercises; his faux-crabby greeting to Joe (Barry Shabaka Henley) at the diner—“You’re nothing”—to which Joe responds in kind; his crossword-puzzle conundrums; his daytime game shows; his regular walks through a dusty town that’s missing only tumbleweed to complete the clichés; his nighttime sessions at a bar among its hard-edged, ball-busting regulars, led by its owner, Elaine, played by Beth Grant. James Darren gets a good riff in, centered on his tangy pronunciation of the word “ungatz.” David Lynch has a role, too—an unfortunate one, as a man who’s heartbroken over the loss of his tortoise, which bears the name President Roosevelt.
In the course of the action, Lucky confronts, mildly but earnestly, the infirmities of age; he also enjoys a sort of social coming out, accepting an invitation to a birthday party for the local bodega owner’s young son, at which Lucky comes out of his shell to deliver, with full-throated drama, a song in Spanish (as Stanton does in “Paris, Texas”). Like Travis, in Wenders’s film, Lucky is a blank, a cipher, a symbol, an empty vessel awaiting the delivery of his over-scripted backstory. Even worse, in “Lucky,” that backstory hardly arrives—only in snippets, in which he explains how he got his nickname (from the harrowing military duty that he survived during the Second World War), expresses a hatred of lawyers, shows a vaguely insubordinate streak explained with a fleeting reference to “ ’68,” and professes a casual atheism and an equally casual existential despair.
The borrowings from “Paris, Texas” are apparent even in the credit sequence of “Lucky,” which, like the Wenders film, show the eponymous protagonist, played by Stanton, wearing a hat and framed against a blue sky. But the director of “Lucky,” John Carroll Lynch (himself a charismatic actor), doesn’t have anything like Wenders’s visual sensibility for conjuring moods onscreen. The movie is a well-intended, loving tribute to Stanton’s art, but it looks narrowly at that art—because of the narrow mold into which Wenders pressed it. It’s a delight to see Stanton walk, turn his head, fix his gaze, think. But it would have been more of a delight to see him expand with a character rather than contract to fit it. For a glimpse of the performer he’s capable of being, watch instead Stanton’s turn in “Twin Peaks: The Return,” playing Carl Rodd, the principled, unsentimental trailer-park manager whose sense of life-worn routine is matched by his alertly empathetic power to rise to the demands of moments of exceptional need. It’s an ennobling portrait, and one to remember Stanton by.
