Paris, Texas

I wrote my first movie review on Letterboxd today. I’m re-posting it here, for posterity.

This is my first review. It may be my only review. This will be rambling, deeply personal, may read as pretentious, and I apologize for none of it. But I did warn you.

I can’t actually review this movie. I can just tell you what it was like for me to watch it. I’m giving 5 stars to what happened to me last night in a tiny, single-screen, old-school theater.

This movie felt like a modern day fairy tale written initially by 8-yr-old me, revised for a few decades, and then shot with a time machine.

I was born in Texas. I lived there for 46 years. I moved to Toronto just a month ago. I saw this movie on my 29th day in a new country, nearly 2,000 miles away from what still feels like home.

The movie starts in west Texas, shooting in a few locations I’m quite sure I’ve stood on. West Texas was a place I discovered very late in my time in Texas [more on that here], taking week-long solo camping trips out there from Austin on my motorcycle, visiting the Chinati Foundation and McDonald Observatory. I first learned of this movie there, where I saw a few references to locations in which it had been shot, and met a couple that claim to be two of the characters from this movie come to life—there certainly was a resemblance.

A simple synopsis of this movie is that it’s about a broken man trying to put his life back together: reuniting with his estranged brother, son, and wife. You could also say it’s the bizarro version of my life’s story, or maybe that mine is the real-world bizarro version of this film’s story.

It begins with two estranged brothers reuniting. I have an old brother. We’re estranged. Getting to see Dean Stockwell’s Walt navigate the emotional intensities, practical challenges, and confusing boundaries of this reunion felt like hearing my therapist describe “how it’s supposed to work.” Walt cares for Travis first, and asks questions second, and keeps caring for him even when he doesn’t get any answers.

I’m damn near the same age as the kid in this movie—Hunter. I had those Return of the Jedi sheets. I ran around talking about space facts, too. In this kid’s life, when his father deserted him his uncle took him in and loved him as his own, and when his birth father returned there was no passive or active aggression related to who got to be “dad” or really any question about how things would work beyond “we’ll care for the people we love.” There’s no shame in any of this. When asked by a schoolmate why he has two dads, Hunter shrugs and says “just lucky, I guess.”

I was abandoned by my father at around the same age as Hunter. I never had such a breezy answer for “where’s your dad?”

The third act of the movie sees Travis, our main character (the spitting image of my father, once he shaves his beard off, by the way) and Hunter traveling to Houston, my birthplace and where I lived for the first 22 years of my life. Again, there are scenes that take place in locations in which I have stood. Streets on which I have driven. Including a long, slow car chase, in which Travis and Hunter are following a car they believe to be driven by Hunter’s mother. When I was about 8, Hunter’s age in this move, I was riding on that same road with my mother when she became visible nervous and covered the side mirror with her hand. She wouldn’t tell me why for several minutes, but when a particular car passed us and got enough distance she explained it looked to her like my father was driving that car. That was one of only two times I was ever near enough to him that I might have seen him. Another time, in downtown Houston (where the third act of the movie takes place), a similar event happened in which my mother told me we’d passed him waiting for a bus. These were the two times in my life I could have actually seen my father, but I didn’t either time. He died in 2005, while I was in the midst of writing him a letter—the first I’d ever attempted to write to him.

In this movie I saw men intuitively doing the right thing when it comes to caring for other people’s hearts. I saw them loving people ferociously, at their own expense. Knowing when to get out of the way, knowing when to lovingly push, knowing when to put the bottle down. In 1983. In my real world, I didn’t see examples of men behaving that way until I caught them out myself, well into adulthood.

I don’t know why this movie works. There’s very little conflict in the action on screen. There are worlds of conflict behind every eyelid and line in the script, though. The performances from Stanton, Stockwell, Kinski, and Carson were incredible. The cinematography is breath-taking for this Texan soul. Those sunsets over the Houston skyline were worth the price of the ticket alone, thanks, in part, to the 4K restoration.

I was not expecting this movie. If you’d told me this was what it was about, I think I might have avoided it, thinking it would just make me mad. In the wrong state of mind (or stage of life), I could have felt this movie was making fun of me. Somehow last night it felt like a modern-day fairytale, with just the right balance of darkness and hope, real life and make-believe.