Guido_TheKillerPimp Review of The American Friend

The American Friend (1977)

Dennis Hopper gives real life to Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders truly atmospheric film

[8/10 · 18 October 2005]

Any reader and fan (of which I am both) of Patricia Highsmith would reject the placement of this film in the "Noir" category. Highsmith was the author of several novels involving Tom Ripley. "The American Friend" is based on "Ripley's Game." Although born in Texas, Highsmith spent most of her adult life in Europe. The Europeon experience is an important feature of her novels. An even more important feature, one which seems to permeate every page, is a feeling much more than "Noir." This is not so much "Noir"; which, unfortunately, has grown to be synonymous with "Crime" in American Noir films of the past twenty years, as is an absence of morality. This amorality, personified in Tom Ripley is wonderfully fleshed out by Wim Wenders' direction of Dennis Hopper in "The American Friend". Ripley is a self-involved narcissist who breaks the monotony of his naval-staring to ruin the life of several people just to see if it can be done. His focus is Jonathan Zimmerman, an Ubermensch with a pre-school age son and an extremely devoted wife scraping out a life as a picture-framer while dealing with a chronic illness. Wenders completely places the viewer in Zimmerman's world as he putters around his shop between the occasional framing job only to come home to a horribly cramped apartment in the worst part of Hamburg. The viewer may be put off at the way the film plods along at times, but this is all part of the palette from which Wenders paints a world of futility for Zimmerman (and shared by residents of the post WWII/pre end of Cold War West Germany) as he begins to believe his illness is closing in around him worse than his life. The patient viewer allows a Wenders film to wash over them and breathes deep the atmosphere Wenders conveys - even if this atmosphere is terribly dreadful and smothering. Through his agent, Reeves, Ripley gives Zimmerman a chance to do right by his family by becoming a hit men of mobsters. The world closes in even more on Zimmerman as Reeves directs Zimmerman to perform the killing on a train. As Wenders moves his characters across Europe he transports the viewer within the dangerous pages of a Highsmith novel where the most everyday people are one step away the most horrible of acts. Who do we most identify with...Zimmerman?...Ripley? How close are we to these personas under the right - or wrong - circumstances. Give "The American Friend" a try and find out for yourself.