Memorable, crazy movie

Fantastic!

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

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.

I will admit that I watched this film having previously, repeatedly, watched and loved the later "Ripleys Game" with John Malkovitch as the eponymous eminence gris. So I cannot consider the Wenders version without comparison. Really though there is no comparison.I am staggered at how Wenders fans at this site seem to be preoccupied by the directors brilliance...as indicated in other work.I prefer to try to see what is before me. It isn't impressive.Compared to the Malkovitch rendition, Hopper is utterly unbelievable. Malkovitch is the cool, manipulative, patrician sophisticate and sociopath that fits Ripleys form. When he talks art we believe it. Hopper is just a bumbling joke. In no sense can we believe the proposition that such a flake could succeed as a player in the world of fine art dealing. He wouldn't get through the door. Ray Winstones clubland villain in Ripleys Game is totally believable. The French guy in this movie is just a vacant nothing, the echo of a fart that Winstone might deposit in passing. The American gangland henchmen are utterly ridiculous. They don't have a muscle between them and are as menacing as a tea lady. The fight scenes are a pathetic joke, reminiscent of something out of a Sixties spy spoof, one tap on the head and a guys dead. Yeah! The movie is padded out with empty scenes that serve no discernible function, such as Hopper playing with a polaroid camera. One senses Wenders trying to create "iconic" images, Ganz leaning bout of a train cab screaming...but they just don't work. How the heck would he gain access to the train cab anyway? The whole thing is amateurish, pretentious and glib. Nothing has substance. Its badly edited. Sloppily shot. Inconsistently lit. The music is dire and doesn't segue properly with the cuts of each scene.Ganz is superb, but Hoppers "performance" undermines that. He looks like he thinks the film is some funny foreign farce that he will take part in just for the fee but indicates his disrespect via various tells in expression amounting to a suggestion that he is playing "tongue in cheek" yet flatly without irony. I greatly enjoy him in other movies, even B-movies, but in this he was embarrassing to watch.I suspect that most of the high scorers here would agree with at least some of my opinions had they seen the movie without knowing its author.

"What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?" asks Dennis Hopper at the beginning of the movie, wearing a Stetson like he just entered the wrong picture. For viewers used to the suave, sophisticated Tom Ripley played by Matt Damon and John Malkovich, Dennis Hopper's version will look like an abomination - unapologetically American, full of American speech mannerisms, slightly crazy and more than once acting like he's hopped on drugs. But that's the beauty of the movie, a beauty unique to the '70s, when American actors collaborated with European filmmakers, when different influences merged to create something unique.Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, the movie follows Tom Ripley, bon vivant, art dealer and occasional murderer. Enjoying success selling fake pictures of a popular but dead artist, one day he meets a picture-framer, Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), who displeases him. His mistake? To say 'I've heard of you' in a disdainful manner and refusing to shake hands with Ripley.Jonathan is dying from a blood disease and has more on his mind than social niceties. He has medical bills to pay and he's worried about the future of his son and wife (Lisa Kreuzer) after he passes away. So he becomes the perfect person for Ripley to turn into a murderer when a criminal friend (Gérard Blain) asks him to find someone to kill a rival for money. Quickly the movie enters fertile territory that lets Wenders explore questions about personal responsibility, duplicity, and the nature of evil.Although Tom Ripley usually has the spotlight in his movies, here the main character is Jonathan. Bruno Ganz plays this everyman with compassion for his predicament and also with a feeling of being trapped between accepting his fate and enjoying the freedom to become a murder it grants him. Quite fascinating are the scenes with his family, which become increasingly darker, going from idyllic to nightmarish as his secret life distances him from his wife.Dennis Hopper gives a great performance too as Jonathan's amoral friend who plays with his life like a child with putty, manipulating it for no good reason other than personal gratification. Unconcerned with what he has done to him, he only intervenes to help him when Jonathan's problems become his own. That's Tom Ripley: elegant and nice on the outside, empty on the inside, collector of art but hardly a sensitive man, owner of a beautiful neoclassic mansion filled with objects wrapped in plastic. Once the movie ends the viewer is left wondering which of the two is the greatest fake.Although these two actors would make the movie worth watching just for their performances, Wenders nevertheless crafted a tense, suspenseful thriller that stands on its own. Mixing cinematography reminiscent of American noir cinema with the slow pacing of '70s thrillers, this is mostly a visual experience in which sequences go on for many minutes without words spoken, the action directed by the camera and acting alone.Sadly there aren't cowboys in Hamburg anymore. European and American cinema ignore each other, happily proud of their provincialism. But The American Friend stands as a reminder of a time when cinema knew no borders and when artists were more daring.

Let's start with the good news: Bruno Ganz, in the part of a tragic hero tricked into felony, will make it worth your while. But pretty much everything else about "The American Friend" will please only the most dedicated followers of art-house director Wim Wenders. Although this is one of his earliest feature-length movies, it is already riddled with his trademark allusions to the history and theory of moving images, ranging from a Zoetrope toy and ubiquitous surveillance cameras to the lead character putting himself "in frame" by hanging a picture frame around his neck. Against the backdrop of Hamburg's grimy port, Wenders indulges his obsession with American culture in the guise of Dennis Hopper. Posing as a fake cowboy, he feeds fake American paintings back to the American market by way of a German auction house. The final third of the story, from the moment Zimmermann gets on the train, is completely incomprehensible without prior knowledge of the book it is based on, "Ripley's Game". What little action we see is awfully shot; most of the time, it's slow-moving people mumbling lines from Bob Dylan songs as they go about their somber business in a parallel universe heavy with misery and meaning. What we need is filmmakers who care less about movies and more about life.