So the Criterion Channel is two years old, and they put up a page with the most-watched movies on the service over those two years. Because the most-watched movies is by definition a popularity contest, turns out I’ve seen a lot of them — but not this one (nor some of the other highly-popular Wim Wenders movies on the list).

And hey, turns out this is popular for a reason. Although Wenders is German, this is a movie about the mythic American West. Not in the old-timey 1880 sense of Taming The Frontier, but in the old-timey 1980 sense of A Vast And Desolate Expanse Where A Person Can Lose Themselves.

I really sort of feel like this is a kind of thing that’s no longer possible in a modernity full of digital records and mobile communications and GPS. Like, at one point early in the movie, a character living in LA gets an unexpected phone call from Terlingua, Texas, and has to make his way there. To someone in 1985, this is an epic adventure: Finding out where Terlingua is is going to be a research project. Arranging a flight to a nearby city and then figuring out where to drive probably requires you to pick up an atlas or two. And you’re going into the trip blind, with no idea of what exists in Terlingua — does it have hotels, or will I be sleeping out of my car? And then of course, once you’re on the way, you’re completely out of touch with anyone back home except for short check-in calls from a payphone, whenever you happen to stop at one of those.

In modernity, meanwhile, you’d just Google the address, take a look at Maps to see what restaurants and hotels are out there, make a reservation at Villa Terlingua (“a unique experience in a charming place with a hostess that is incredibly friendly and helpful”, one of the forty reviews says), and just use GPS to nav your rental car there from the airport, chatting on the phone along the way and answering your work emails when you stop for gas. There’s a concept of space and isolation that’s essentially disappeared in modernity.

This is kind of a digression on my point, but only kind of, because this movie is really about that, at least at first. When the movie begins, we see a ragged-looking Harry Dean Stanton stagger in from the desert and collapse in a gas station in Terlingua. Who he is, and what he was doing out there is the central mystery that the movie unravels over the course of its two hours; I watched this blind, knowing absolutely nothing about where it was going, and I’d recommend that you do the same if it sounds interesting.

Spoilers

So it turns out that the desert wanderer has been lost to everyone he knows for four years now. Dean Stockwell is his brother, and comes to pick him up from Los Angeles, and the road trip back to LA is basically the first third of the movie, wherein Stanton slowly comes back to humanity — he won’t talk at first, displays no emotion, and wanders off if left alone; but as he interacts more with his brother, he starts to return to himself. This is the part that most captures that sense of the vast West, with cinematography and character interactions that work to evoke a feeling of emptiness and silence and isolation. So much of this depends on the actors establishing the right tone here, because it would have been easy for this to devolve into something Rain Man-like; but they nail it, and it doesn’t.

The second part of the film is Stanton adapting back to normal life at Dean Stockwell’s house, made more complicated by the part where Dean and his wife have been raising their brother’s abandoned son for the last four years. The tentative feeling-out of re-establishing the relationship between Stanton and his son — seven years old now, so only three when he was abandoned — is done well, and carries into the third part of the movie.

This is another road trip, this time with Stanton and his son going to find the kid’s mother, who also abandoned her son despite not being on a multi-year not-entirely-sane desert walkabout. So yeah, this is the part where we finally get to hear the story of what happened to bring things to this state, which we get in a way that barely nods at realism. The two adults end up speaking in this artificial situation where they can’t see each other clearly — meaningful communication happening in these circuitous ways is a theme the movie uses repeatedly, with walkie-talkies having been key earlier — and deliver a series of long narrative monologues.

This scene could have fallen down in a bunch of ways, from the logistical (“okay, cool, so he just wandered off into the desert and walked for five days… yadda yadda, four years later he walks out of the desert?”) to the aesthetic (nobody really speaks in short stories). But the acting is great, and taken as the kind of almost fable-like story it is, I think it works, as does the final resolution of things despite the unanswered questions that inevitably follow on it.

Good stuff for anyone interested in this kind of tale of the mythic west, and willing to not pick too hard at the logic of things. Recommended.