Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I saw this Wim Wenders film in the cinema when it came out in 1984 but it made so little impact on me that before this rewatch I had no recollection as to the plot, and it turned out that I had completely erased  two major characters from my memory.  I guess this speaks to the amorphous nature of the story, such as it is, and the fact that there are very few scenes of high drama, and that the ending is rather open-ended. It's also the case that Travis, the lead character (played by Harry Dean Stanton), is opaque and difficult to get a handle on. At the start of the film he just appears in the Texan wilderness, with no explanation as to how he got there or why.  Eventually we learn that four years previously he had simply disappeared, leaving behind his wife Jane and and his young son Hunter, but we never get an explanation as to what we was doing in the interim, or why initially he doesn't speak, even to his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) who collects him. We just have to ...