Turning Shakespearean Tricks
You may not be sure exactly how you feel when My Own Private Idaho ends, but you'll sure as hell know you haven't seen another cookie-cutter movie. Gus Van Sant doesn't play it safe, and the success of his 1989 cult hit "Drugstore Cowboy" has only emboldened him to further push the outside of the envelope. Some of the risks he takes are cockeyed magic, and some are so daffy maybe nobody could have pulled them off. But his third feature--the last in an informal trilogy of the streets that began with "Mala Noche" in 1986--leaves absolutely no doubt that Van Sant is the freshest new voice working in American movies.
The two young men--Portland, Ore., street hustlers and best friends--at the center of "Private Idaho" couldn't be more different. Ratty, blond Mike (River Phoenix) is a sweet, pathetic sad sack. Homeless and abandoned, he's obsessed with the idea of finding his mother-recollected in bleached-out, handheld home-movie images-who has long since vanished. He's also narcoleptic. In moments of stress, he's apt to pass out in a heap, which puts a severe crimp in his effectiveness as a prostitute.
The tall, dark, self-contained Scott (Keanu Reeves) is another story: he's a slumming aristocrat. The son of Portland's mayor, he'll only have sex with men for money--he's basically "straight"--and it's clear he's acting out a mammoth rebellion against his father, with whom he's no less obsessed than Mike with his mom.
The weirdest thing about Scott--and Van Sant's wildest risk--is that the character is based on Shakespeare's Prince Hal. As in the "Henry IV" plays, Scott has his own dissolute Falstaffian surrogate father whom he ultimately rejects, the gravel-voiced, dissipated Bob Pigeon (pungently played by William Richert).
Van Sant's screenplay welds these two stories-Mike's search for his mother, which takes him all the way to Rome, and Scott's Shakespearean revels as he awaits his inheritance. And the welding shows. How could it not? When Bob Pigeon is around, the actors actually speak in updated Shakespearean language, soliloquies and all. It's a fascinating idea, but it doesn't work. An unmistakable self-consciousness comes over the movie in its boisterous Shakespearean passages, and you feel Reeves, a good naturalistic actor, clenching whenever he shifts into Elizabethan rhythms.
Playful, melancholy, tender and blackly funny, "Private Idaho's" deliberately deracinated style is a kind of mirror of the fractured lives of its street kids. Van Sant thinks like a poet or painter as much as a storyteller: in this meditation on the search for family, the recurring images of salmon leaping upstream, clouds scudding across the sky, an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a field, are as thematically essential as the story itself. What's remarkable about Van Sant's vision of the streets is that his sympathy for his characters is free of melodrama, moralism or sentimentality. A sweet absurdist, he manages to combine ironic detachment with emotional generosity. The campfire scene in which Mike awkwardly declares his unrequited love for Scott is a marvel of delicacy. In this, and every scene, Phoenix immerses himself so deeply inside his character you almost forget you've seen him before: it's a stunningly sensitive performance, poignant and comic at once. "My Own Private Idaho" is a far cry from seamless, but I would gladly trade a dozen well-made studio movies for one of its vital parts.
