Harry Dean Stanton has appeared in nearly 200 movies and television shows since his world-weary presence surfaced 60 years ago. Instantly recognizable yet never a household name, Stanton is a character actor of a certain type, an old-school throwback to the likes of Ward Bond or his contemporary Bruce Dern — guys who add gritty, if often eccentric, authenticity to pretty much everything in which they appear.
Stanton started his career in television, playing a series of grifters, soldiers and down-on-their-luck guys throughout the 1950s and ’60s. It’s a portion of his career barely touched in Sophie Huber’s Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, a selective, sometimes frustrating, ultimately poignant look at the actor’s life and career.
Like the subject of her documentary, Huber’s approach is stripped back and unpretentious. Handheld camera work and black-and-white on-camera interview footage with the actor give Partly Fiction an intimate feel. But the most compelling aspect of this impressionistic, scattershot portrait is Stanton’s reluctance to fully answer Huber’s questions about his personal life. Words might fail him, but his eyes tell us everything.
1984’s Paris, Texas remains Stanton’s calling card, his only real leading role, a moving, understated performance that wouldn’t have worked as well with anyone else. Paris, Texas’ director Wim Wenders and screenwriter Sam Shepard briefly appear on camera to confirm as much. David Lynch — a kindred spirit with whom the actor made multiple films — also shows up briefly for an encounter on Stanton’s couch to ask him questions about his apparently turbulent childhood in rural Kentucky and the fact that he never married, which again yield poetic if not quite illuminating answers.
Despite his insistence that he’s always playing a version of himself, Stanton is a mystery, all the better to believe the characters he’s inhabited in everything from the still-powerful Paris, Texas to his recent role as evil patriarch Roman Grant in HBO’s Big Love.
Grade: B+
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2014.