Freaktana
A Major Disappointment
Lollivan
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Jenni Devyn
Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.
lasttimeisaw
At the age of 32, a prolific Wim Wenders forays into adapting Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley story to the celluloid screen in his seventh feature, THE AMERICAN FRIEND receives a Cannes main competition entry and stars Dennis Hopper as the self-exile middle-aged Tom Ripley in a cowboy hat living inside a big mansion on his ownsome in Hamburg, partakes in art forgery racket. Nicholas Ray plays a presumedly dead painter Derwatt, sometimes wears an eye-patch, cynically tossing off new works for Ripley to sell in the auction house.It is where, Ripley meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz in his big screen breakout role), a painter framer and art restorer, who is diagnosed with a rare blood disease, may or may not be pushing up daisies any day sooner, Jonathan unceremoniously brushes aside Ripley with a curt "I've heard of you" (a , the slight triggers the latter's retaliation (typically Ripley!), by disseminating rumors about the former's blood condition to be fatal, and recommends Jonathan when a French gangster Raoul Minot (Blain) needs a candidate with a clean slate as a hitman. Rebuffing Minot's offer at first, Jonathan naively agrees to have another medical checkup in a Parisian hospital organized by Minot, beyond any doubt, no one would believe that its pessimistic outcome is not doctored by Minot but Jonathan himself, tempted to earn some fast money for his wife Marianne (Kreuzer) and their son Daniel (Dedecke) when he will be gone, he commits his first sortie (conveniently) inside a Paris metro station (albeit drolly clumsy) before heading back to Hamburg. However, an improbable freemasonry between Ripley and Jonathan burgeons in spite of their prima facie disfavor, Wenders fidgets with multifarious artifacts to smooth the transition, objects like golden foil, zoetrope, stereopticon, gyroscope, Polaroid, etc. suffuse the faintly insipid narrative with its ethos-signalling vim and melancholia, which writs large in Ripley's solitary existence, e.g. his monologue "There is nothing to fear but fear itself" is manifested not once but twice, infused with lurid chromatic choices in full bloom (red, blue, leaden-gray and green are primal pointers to the mood-scape). Their bond veers into partners-in-crime when Jonathan nearly botches a second mission on a train from Munich to Hamburg if not for Ripley's sudden succor, and Ripley's confession as the rumormonger, apparently doesn't stir Jonathan's ill-feelings, only leads to a final betrayal after they eliminate their common assailants, that halts with an ironic outcome when mortality suddenly beckons. Less a genre practitioner than an arch stylist, Wenders meanders through the discomfiting drama with an Edward Hopper-esque commitment to its milieu and surroundings, tonally, it bewitchingly tallies with Tom Ripley's existential crisis which vaguely stoked by a smack of homoerotic impulse, and Jonathan's thrill-inflected imprudence. A brooding Bruno Ganz eloquently betrays an enthralling temperament which is buried under Jonathan's pedestrian appearance, and is affectively unpredictable and sympathetic in the eyes of this beholder. Dennis Hopper has a less prominent screen-time but it is an eye-pleasing experience (on the condition that if we could overlook his unsavory wig during the scenes of the second mission) to watch him not in his trademark menacing mode, but registers something more self-revealing. Lisa Kreuzer, is hindered by a stereotyped suspicious wife role, must put on a strong face against all odds, yet plumbing into a feminine mindset is not Wenders' forte.A cineaste's lollapalooza, with many an auteur taking on an acting gig (Nicolas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Daniel Schmid, Jean Eustache, not to mention actor/director hyphenates Hopper and Blain), THE AMERICAN FRIEND is a testament that Wenders' faculty is on the verge of its full maturity, not a conventionally cut-throat crime thriller but a nostalgic scenester recapitulating its zeitgeist with a splash of idiosyncrasy and quaintness.
d_m_s
Much like Paris, Texas (the only other Wenders film I've seen), this is a very nicely shot film and I enjoyed most of it purely on aesthetics alone.However, I did not think the storyline was up to much and the fact that it hinges on a rather ridiculous scenario (that an average guy with a terminal illness would agree to kill two strangers in return for money to pay for his family after his death) made it all the harder to watch. It's not that the intention is all that ridiculous but the fact that he was so gullible as to believe these gangsters when they sent him to random doctors who told him he was going to die very soon yet his own doctor proclaimed otherwise. It was a bit like, well, they're OBVIOUSLY conning you and just paying these quack doctors to tell you that you are going to die, just to scare you & get you to do the job! Plus the possibility of getting away with it and the family not being in any danger either form the gangsters or the law afterwards was hard to believe also. I mean, we even saw that CCTV recorded him doing the first killing in the subway so he would have been caught anyway and if he died in the interim his family would still have been hounded by the law. So in that sense it was all rather contrived.The ending, as noted in one other review I have just read, was a weird change of tone and became almost (unintentionally?) comical and it also dragged out too much.All in all, I loved a lot of how the film looked but I don't think I could be bothered to sit through this film again.
patrickstapleton
The main reviewer identifies a flaw in the script. "Didn't the afflicted character ever hear of life insurance." The reviewer should know and I am sure the late great and lovely Pat Highsmith already knew, that one can't insure an existing condition. The insurance companies aren't that daft, or, at all. Perhaps there is an opening for Ripley to take exception to this and wreak his horrible revenge on the insurance establishment and their desperate commission hungry sputniks. He could play a bogus insurance salesman offering life cover to the terminally ill, fiddling the applications and medical data and ladling oodles of dosh into his bogus bank accounts when the punters pop their clogs.Imagine him joining a insurance company boiler room set-up and wreaking mayhem against scumbag sales people, their gutter crawling supervisors, sales prospects that give him a hard time on the telephone and cynical insurance company owners. I saw a later version of this with Malkovich playing the sociopath Ripley, the effete serial killer cad. Malkovich was born to play Ripley. Haven't seen this Hopper one. But look forward to comparing Malkovich with Hopper.
robert-temple-1
Patricia Highsmith began infusing the world of film with creepy stories as early as 1951, with Hitchcock's masterpiece 'Strangers on a Train'. Her novels about the criminal character Ripley have been popular with several leading directors, and here Wenders has a go at her novel 'Ripley's Game'. It is not totally successful, and it is 'a real downer', with its gloom unalleviated. But it is yet another of Wenders's great films, just terribly depressing and leaving a sickly taste in the mouth. But of course that was what Highsmith aimed at, and Wenders duly executed. The main theme of the film is complicity, and the sub-text is the thin veneer of morality that lies across the surface of most respectable people, which can be more brittle than we imagine and under stress can reveal a spider's web of myriad cracks which quickly reduce the most smoothly groomed personality to a crinkled mass, like a shattered mirror which hangs on in its frame and refuses to drop. Here the shattered mirror is played by Bruno Ganz, a respectable and moral person leading a quiet life as a picture framer in Hamburg (a marvellously gloomy city). Lisa Kreuzer, who had made several Wenders films already, plays his silent and worried wife with deep intensity, and requires no lines of dialogue to convey her fears. Ganz believes he is dying, so he takes drastic measures to secure financial security for his wife and child. Ripley is played with subtlety and genius by Dennis Hopper, as an amiable American in a cowboy hat with a worm in his soul, but who beneath the criminal levels of his personality has an overwhelming and desperate craving for a real friend who is a nice person. We then see the complicity between these two opposites evolve through a harrowing tale of murder and corruption, with the pathetic Ganz becoming increasingly brazen and the brazen Hopper becoming increasingly pathetic, thus merging into one another. We see Hopper's essential loneliness when he is stripped psychologically naked by events. Ganz thinks he needs Hopper, but it is Hopper who really needs Ganz. Highsmith was intrigued by concealed needs, subliminal agendas, and dominance swops. This is a deep psychological melodrama between two men who in normal life would never even meet, much less end up as buddies. Wenders plunges in and gleefully excplores this moral maze with all the eagerness of a ferret in a rabbit hole. What fun he has! And film director Nicholas Ray is marvellous in his cameo as an aged painter of forgeries, living under an assumed name after having faked his own death. Everything about this film is morally dubious, and that is the point. After all, isn't most of life morally dubious? And aren't most people, when put to the test? Here, two unlike objects are struck together and both surprisingly turn out to be flints, producing fire and setting the kindling alight. Watch the blaze.
