Movie Shelf: The American Friend (Page 1)

MOVIE SHELF

john cribbs

WIM WENDERS' THE AMERICAN FRIEND

Welcome to the first entry of Movie Shelf, a series I decided to activate ostensibly as an excuse to write about some of my favorite movies, ones that I've grabbed off the shelf countless times to review, study, and just enjoy. Too often I feel like the film writing I'm doing (especially at the end of the year) tends to be overtly negative; a devastating realization to someone who genuinely loves movies as much as I do. So this is an attempt to balance things out a little by shamelessly gushing and, hopefully, bringing some visability to movies that I think unquestioningly deserve it. Also I hope this forum will help me branch out a little and give me a chance to further develop my own film writing (small dress rehearsals for the book project I hope to complete over the next year).

Like any good movie shelf the films are in alphabetical order, with the first set of 26 titles covering every letter from A to Z.

"You look at a dark story like the Highsmith story that the film is based on and the challenge is to make something that is different than its source while trying to honor it. Not everyone thought that film was a success..." Wim Wenders

Ripley's Game wasn't the Patricia Highsmith novel Wim Wenders had wanted to film. He had inquired about making a movie from her novel The Cry of the Owl, but the rights had already been spoken for. As it turned out, so had the rights to every published Highsmith work up to that time. When word reached her that he was interesting in adapting something she'd written, Highsmith offered Wenders first dibs on her new manuscript: the third book to feature her manipulative anti-hero Tom Ripley. Of course Wenders jumped at the offer to film the novel but he was nervous about its dark tone, finding its pessimistic, noir-like atmosphere at odds with his own romantic notions of the world, as depicted in his early eccentric road movies. Mainly he felt uneasy about translating the lead character, expressing his concern about being "not gifted in showing bad guys." His first choice to play Ripley, previously portrayed on screen with suave certainty by Alain Delon in Rene Clement's sun-drenched Purple Noon, was John Cassavetes.* Cassavetes was unavailable, but suggested that Wenders consider casting Dennis Hopper. When the director arrived at the airport to collect his new star, he found a bedraggled Hopper dressed in full military fatigues, unkempt and unshaven, fresh from the set of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines.

Maybe returning as a veteran from that famously unhinged and war-like production was somewhat responsible for the wounded and weighty performance Hopper gave for Wenders (in his review of the film, Ebert said Hopper looked "about half-recovered from being shotgunned in Easy Rider.") His Ripley has a spectral quality about him, a detachment from the events and characters that seems almost like self-exile from life. He's a ghost who can't touch anyone else or control anything around him and therefore wanders through the film impassably, a stasis manifested in the shot of Hopper heedlessly tightrope-walking the slim edge of a bridge over the active West Side Highway. He's a bad guy so far removed from the plot as to be practically uninvolved until the second half of the movie. His lack of involvement is so total that he's almost not a bad guy at all; this is a character we know from the previous Highsmith books and films to be a manipulative con artist and murderer, yet Hopper's version even manages to charm a young boy. Especially considering the threatening presence of villains he played with the kind of manic intensity popularly attributed to him, this quiet and sensitive portrayal seems even more unique for Hopper, and certainly a far cry from his ravings as the addled, obsessed photojournalist in Coppola's movie. That was a Dennis Hopper feeding off the collective madness of a community gone to the dark side; here, he's most active in finding ways to set himself away from the crowd and allow the shadows to envelop him.

Wenders retitled the film The American Friend, a conscious reference to the western influence on the movie and the filmmaker. Of the German New Wave auteurs, Wenders had the most in common with the French New Wavers and their incorporation of American props and cultural references into their work, most obviously their shared interest in the classic American road movie. Of course the parallel here is that Highsmith had erased her past as "Mary Plangman from Fort Worth" when her success led her to a new half-celebrity, half-recluse life in Europe and inspired her to populate her later books with foreign characters and settings. Wenders inverses the European components of Ripley's Game: besides stripping the title character of his rich French wife and removing any trace of the epicureanist greed that often motivates him in the novels, Wenders takes Ripley out of his leisurely estate Belle Ombre and situates him in a colonial house littered with Americana, including pin ball machines, a classic pool table and neon light beer advertisements. Hopper's appearance as Ripley is aggressively American, from his Stetson cowboy hat and frilled coat to his mangled two-word German phrases. He's even introduced singing the "The Ballad of Easy Rider," a thread to connect Wenders' love of road movies to Hopper's landmark 1969 film. "What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?" Wender's Ripley muses, speaking for a director blatant in his inclusion of American costumes and props. But while Ripley's collection of western treasures appears comforting, most of them are covered with plastic or regarded by their owner with alien curiosity, like he doesn't know what to do with them. Out of his own country these things have no context - his curious regard of them mirrors both Wenders' own inquisitive trek to understand American culture (a journey chronicled in his wonderful photography book Once) as well as his own feeling of displacement as the director of arty, existential road movies now tasked to direct a genre story in the tradition of a classic Hollywood thriller.

That sense of displacement and struggle as an artist saturates Wenders' take on the novel and Ripley as a character. In the movie, Ripley is an admitted frustrated artist - "I always wanted to be able to make something with my hands," he confesses to the picture framer who has himself been revealed as a failed painter. As we know from the Highsmith books, Ripley's art is crime and he gets what he wants through murder and manipulation. He lacks an identity in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and therefore forges and kills to steal the success he'd never achieve on his own. In the second (and, in my opinion, best) novel, Ripley Under Ground, he runs a scam involving a dead artist which eventually leads to him taking on the identity of the man himself, thus reaping the benefits of his counterfeiting while simultaneously enjoying the reputation of a great painter. Ripley's Game is a little more complicated: his motivation to set the crooked events in play are seemingly prompted by a snub, when the framer dismisses an introduction with an ambivalent "Yes, I've heard of you." To Ripley this implies the man has knowledge of his criminal background, but moreso that he knows Ripley to be a fraud who has no place amongst these people. And the one thing the character desperately needs is to be accepted: Under Ground's art forgery scheme, transplanted to The American Friend as a subplot to establish Ripley's background, is at the crux really just an excuse to surround himself with high cultural types in order to feel secure and somehow tap into their artistic collective.

Wender also likes to surround himself with artists and American Friend is filled with fellow filmmakers of all nationalities: Peter Lilienthal, Jean Eustache, Daniel Schmid, Sam Fuller and of course Dennis Hopper. Beyond the "let's play guns" amusement of casting these renowned directors as gangsters and murder victims, it's clear that Wenders feels closer to the story by populating it with supportive friends and colleagues who inspire him (Fuller for one played an important part in convincing Wenders to make Alice in the Cities, the first film to garner international acclaim for the younh director). Most noteworthy of the auteur lineup is Nicholas Ray, whom Wenders revered as much as the Cahiers crowd in France and convinced to take the small role of Derwatt, who was actually the subject of the main plot in Ripley Under Ground. In moving Ripley's involvement with Derwatt to a subplot in American Friend, Wenders significantly changes the role. In Under Ground, Derwatt is dead - Ripley has managed to keep the death a secret, convince everyone that Derwatt is a recluse, and hire a forger to continue creating paintings that sell through the roof. Wenders has Ray play Derwatt himself who, believed dead by everyone but Ripley, resides alone in New York, reproducing multiple copies of his own famous paintings which go for high figures at auctions due to the belief that the artist's work is now a finite commodity. He has literally become his own forger.

Ray had suffered a breakdown on the set of his 1963 film 55 Days of Peking: the movie was finished by the second unit team and Ray wouldn't helm a completed film for the last 15 years of his life, largely spending his time editing footage for an unfinished project shot with students at Binghamton University. So the connection to Derwatt, thought dead to the world and forced to constantly work on art that can never be completed, is obvious. If Ripley, the only man aware of Derwatt's existence, is an extension of Wenders' own frustrations as a filmmaker then Derwatt is certainly meant to represent Ray, a filmmaker without a crew alone in his New York apartment, Wenders' genuine "American friend." Living and dying are also inverted by Wenders in the story; therein lies the significance of bookending the film with Ray/Derwatt, the first scene of him walled away in his apartment fretting over a half-colored canvas, considering it from every possible angle (even using the false eye), the final shot him walking alone down the West Side Highway. (For more on the director's work, check out Chris Funderburg's epic series Second Chances: Nicholas Ray).

Everything in between those two shots are variations of the two actions that they convey: staying in one place and traveling somewhere - waiting to die, moving towards death or defiantly away from it.** Perpetually on the road to oblivion is the framer, Jonathan Zimmerman, played with mellow gloom by Bruno Ganz. He's been diagnosed with a rare blood disease and, when he hears a vague rumor that his condition may have worsened, he accepts a stranger's offer to assassinate a rival gangster in exchange for money that his wife and son can live on in the event of his death.*** The rumor of course has been perpetrated by Ripley as revenge for Jonathan's "I've heard of you" remark, intended to lead Jonathan to the gangster and his felonious offer. But it's a "game" in that Ripley is curious to see if Jonathan will accept the assignment. Jonathan remains confident that he won't go through with the murder, allowing himself to be coaxed by the gangster into a trip to Paris to get a second opinion from another doctor. Wenders shows every stage of his journey, from airport to airport onto the automatic walkways and down the depths of the Paris metro on escalators that lead to the man he's been asked to eliminate. The recurring noir fatalism theme is literalized in Jonathan's movements - this man is so desperate to die, he allows himself to be manipulated, believing the phony news of his impending death even though he strongly suspects them to be falsified. He lets himself be led under superficial pretexts (searching for an answer to his health scare) and justifiable reasoning (earning money for his family) to commit murder when the truth is that he's bringing to others what is denied him: death. There's a connection there between Derwatt, who is believed dead but wishes to be alive, and Jonathan, who lives but seeks only to die.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK IN THE SECOND PART OF MOVIE SHELF #1

* I think Cassavetes would have been interesting in any of the three main roles.

** Originally Wenders planned to the end the movie with a shot of Derwatt using black paint to destroy his original work, then stopping when he realizes he's gone blind.

*** Although they are miles apart in terms of everything, the basic set-up of TV's exceptional "Breaking Bad" is very similar.

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