Wim Wenders's American road film. Harry Dean Stanton walks out of the desert and the film takes two and a half hours to explain why.
The film opens on Travis Henderson walking alone through the Texas-Mexico border desert. He has been missing for four years. He collapses in a small-town clinic; his brother Walt is called from Los Angeles and drives to retrieve him. Travis cannot or will not speak for the first hour of the film. He has a young son, Hunter, who has been living with Walt and his wife Anne in Los Angeles since Travis disappeared. Travis's wife Jane, the boy's mother, also vanished.
The film tracks Travis's slow re-emergence into speech and his eventual road trip with Hunter to find Jane. The third act takes place in Houston, where Jane works as a performer in a one-way-mirror peep-show booth. The Travis-Jane reunion is one of the most-discussed sequences in 1980s cinema — two extended monologues delivered through the peep-show glass, neither character able to fully see the other. The film closes with Travis reuniting Hunter with Jane and driving away alone.
Paris, Texas was Wim Wenders's most-significant English-language film. Wenders, the German New Wave director (Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, The American Friend), had been working in America since the late 1970s. Paris, Texas was, in some sense, his most-fully-realised film as a European observer of American landscape and emotional geography. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 1984.
What distinguishes Paris, Texas from American-directed road films of the period is its observational patience. Wenders shoots the Texas landscape, the small towns, the gas stations, the highway signage with the attention of someone for whom the visual register is genuinely strange. The film treats American iconography as worth looking at carefully rather than as familiar backdrop. The result is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-distinctive films ever made about the American landscape — and made by a European director.
The screenplay was written by Sam Shepard, the American playwright whose work on Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love had established him as one of the most-distinctive American dramatic voices of the period. Shepard's specific gift — the rural-American verbal register, the family-history-as-mystery structural approach, the long monologues as confessional set pieces — defines Paris, Texas's substance.
Harry Dean Stanton's Travis is the role of his career. Stanton was, before this film, a working character actor in his late fifties with roughly 100 credits to his name. The Paris, Texas lead established him as a major dramatic actor; he would continue to work consistently for the next three decades until his death in 2017. The performance requires the actor to play extended silent sequences in the first hour, then deliver two of the longest monologues in 1980s cinema in the peep-show scenes. Stanton's specific physical comportment and verbal restraint make both halves of the performance work.
Ry Cooder's score for Paris, Texas is one of the most-distinctive in 1980s European-and-American cinema. The score is built primarily on Cooder's slide guitar — a specific blues-tradition instrument that the film deploys as a kind of American-landscape signature. The main theme has been quoted, covered, and culturally absorbed across decades of subsequent cinema.
What the score does is establish a tonal register that is simultaneously American (the slide guitar's specific cultural associations) and outside-American (the framing is European, observational, slow). The film's argument about the American landscape is partly Cooder's. The pairing of Wenders's camera with Cooder's guitar is one of the most-influential director-composer collaborations in 1980s cinema.