Paris, Texas

 There will be spoilers, so if you haven't seen it and don't want it spoiled for you, go somewhere else.

There's something about loneliness on screen that has always sucked me in. Even in my own work that I write, I somehow keep writing about loneliness and lonely people. Loneliness is certainly something all of us have felt at one time or another, it's a universal feeling, but not something that is necessarily easy to portray on screen. There's something about the lonely people in Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas that draws me in, but also something that keeps me at a distance as well.

Harry Dean Stanton is good as Travis, and I have to wonder if he's named after "God's Lonely Man," Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, another of the great lonely protagonists in cinema history. But there's something unnatural about his loneliness, his silence in the beginning. And this Travis is lonely by his own hand. He longs for his wife, Jane (played by Nastassja Kinski), whom we're told ran out years ago, but we find out it was more that she escaped from Travis and his abuse after he would get angry and verbally and physically assault her when drunk, culminating in tying a cow bell on her leg and then chaining her to the stove when she tried to get away with their son.

This Travis is not Travis Bickle, who longs for connection but can't find it because he's a fucking weirdo who pushes people away subconsciously. That Travis I can relate to. Again, feeling like an outsider is something we've all felt, but thankfully few of us react to it the way that Bickle does, one of the things that makes Taxi Driver such a nightmarish tragedy that haunts me as we can identify with Travis, but not with what he does. But finding out how this Travis horrifically abused Jane makes my inability to truly connect with him understandable, but doesn't make for a better movie. His drive to see Jane again takes on a more sinister tone in hindsight, as does taking his son Hunter with him on the journey from LA to Houston to find Jane. It wasn't a heartwarming father and son connecting over trying to get back "the one that got away" from their family. It's the big of an old man to try and control this young woman, and while I'm happy for the reunion of mother and son in the end, I'm not sure it can last. I mean, what does Jane do after the credits roll? She's working in a peep show, she is on hard times, adding an 8 year old kid into the mix will only make things more difficult.

It's nice that Travis understands that he's bad for Jane, and removes himself from the equation in the end, but it's not exactly noble. Hunter was doing well while living in LA with Travis's brother Walt and his wife Anne. Now Travis has upended the kids whole life. Does Jane drive to LA to be with Walt and Anne? Maybe, and that honestly might be a more interesting movie than what this ultimately adds up to being. Here we get a lonely character trying to find what he's lost, even feeling at many points similar to The Searchers and John Wayne's journey (with a young kid by his side) to save his niece, ultimately walking away in the end after reuniting her with her family. Many of those same elements are here in Paris, Texas but I feel like the framing is different. We know early that Wayne's Ethan Edwards is a bad man. He's racist and sexist and determines to find his niece not to save her, but with the intention to kill her for becoming part of a Native American tribe, for becoming an "other". Yet he takes her home when he sees her, like he's able to see through his previous prejudices because he's happy to see his niece alive and well.

The Travis in our movie is not shown early to be an abusive monster, it's a revelation late that colors our ending with a note of realization from Travis that he's the problem (he has to turn his back on Jane when he talks to her, obviously feeling shame for who he was in the past, even if he doesn't verbalize any remorse for it) and reunites mother and son so that they can be together without the toxic part of things, which was him.

My initial rating for the movie when the credits began rolling was an 8/10, but I feel like I like it less the more I talk about it.