It’s all about escape, and identity, in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game. Wenders’ film is hallucinatory and dreamlike where Highsmith’s prose is calculating, and the result is a strange marriage of book and film, an existentialist journey leading where all journeys lead: death.
Dennis Hopper plays Tom Ripley, an American so American that he wears a cowboy hat in Hamburg. He’s an art dealer, selling paintings by a supposedly-dead artist named Derwatt (played by filmmaker Nicholas Ray in one of the film’s many cameos from directors; Samuel Fuller also appears). At an auction he is snubbed by Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz), and at that innocuous sleight, things begin to spiral to a climax beyond either man’s control.
Ripley circulates a rumor about Zimmerman’s dwindling health; a confederate of Ripley’s enlists Zimmerman as a hitman; the two strike up an unlikely friendship, mostly at Ripley’s behest. The plot of The American Friend is almost inconsequential, although it is certainly intriguing. The film succeeds on the srength of its performances.
Hopper is revelatory here. Exuding effortless cool and oily menace, he’s captivating whenever he’s on screen – which is less than you might think, but his absence weighs heavily on scenes he’s not in, makes you wonder what Ripley is up to. Hopper is always ready with a smile, less ready with an explanation for it. He drops off a painting with Zimmerman to be framed, and says simply, “I’ll be back one of these days.” The line has echoed in my head since I first heard it. It’s the simplicity of the promise, and the vagueness of it, that makes it stick in your head. We don’t know if Ripley has fell notions toward Zimmerman, and neither does Ripley. At the core of Tom Ripley – and this is true for later incarnations of the character, played by Matt Damon and John Malkovich – is a truly lonely man, searching for connection after a lifetime of deprivation. He speaks into a voice recorder: “I know less about who I am, and even less about other people.” But he smiles when he says it. This is the kind of performance (like Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs Miller) that shows you why an actor became so revered in the first place. If you never “got” Hopper before, and I’ll confess I didn’t, this film will make you a convert.
Ganz, in his first major film role, is terrific. Ostensibly playing the straight man, he, too, can’t help being cool, even when the film calls upon him to be the everyman. Nearing the end of his life, Zimmerman wonders what it was all for. Thinking to himself, he wonders what his son will remember of his father: “He had a mustache. We lived by the harbor in a house that had been torn down.” He rejects his domestic surroundings, first smashing a frame that he’s been building, then later using a sheet of gold leaf to pick up a telephone receiver. He’s not intimidated by Ripley; even after apologizing for his rudeness, he makes it clear to Ripley just what he thinks of his profession. The two make an unlikely duo, but through the film’s strange logic, it makes perfect sense to see them working together to throw two men out of a moving train, or even just having a beer. Still Zimmerman can’t help but be suspicious of Ripley; offering to give him the money he’s owed for killing the men, Zimmerman is caught off guard by Ripley’s reply. “I want to be your friend,” Ripley says, in the film’s saddest line.
The American Friend is a collage of indelible images, all captured by the great Robby Muller. Ripley walking alone on a building’s ledge; Zimmerman running through tunnels, always running; a burning ambulance on a beach at sunrise. Jurgen Knieper’s eclectic score – moody, eerie, bombastic – does not capture the mood so much as it enhances it. There is a wonderful alchemy at work here, behind and in front of the camera, and the resultant film is one you’re not likely to forget.
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