Gus Van Sant (1991)
It’s a fine title and a famous film but My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s third feature, now seems dated and jejune. (I don’t know how it seemed twenty-five years ago: I’d not seen it before.) Van Sant’s screenplay draws on an unusual combination of sources: City of Night, a 1963 novel by John Rechy about young gay hustlers, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays (plus a bit of Henry V). The two main characters are partly inspired also by street kids whom Van Sant himself got to know in the late 1980s. This pair are sharply contrasted. Mike (River Phoenix) is poor and comes from a broken home. He’s on a continual search for the mother who walked out on him. His biological father, Mike realises, is his elder brother Richard (James Russo). Mike’s friend Scott (Keanu Reeves) doesn’t need to turn tricks to make a living. His father (Tom Troupe), who holds political office, deplores what his son is currently doing with his life but Scott remains heir to the family fortune. The Falstaff to his Prince Hal is a middle-aged man called Bob (William Richert), a mentor and father figure to a group of hustlers and other street people, who hang out in a derelict building.
The action takes place in three different American states – Washington and Oregon, as well as Idaho – and also includes, when Mike learns his mother went to work there, an impulsive and fateful journey to Italy. Much of the story is set in Portland, Oregon, where Scott’s father is mayor, but the film begins and ends with Mike alone, on the same stretch of deserted highway in Idaho, which he describes as ‘like someone’s face, like a fucked-up face’. On both occasions, he has a narcoleptic fit and falls to the ground. There are other such collapses in the course of the movie: his narcolepsy enables Mike not only to shut out the present but also to play home movies of his childhood and his mother in his mind. The metaphorical aspects of his condition are one of several elements in My Own Private Idaho that are individually striking but which play out without much traction between them. Others include encounters with a succession of variously kinky clients, an amusing bit when the characters are animated-figure cover boys on gay magazines, and the Bob-Falstaff routines.
These showy diversions tend to get in the way of River Phoenix’s strongly interior portrait of Mike, though not enough to obscure its quality. Phoenix is particularly affecting in the scene, during a trip that Mike and Scott make to Idaho, in which the two boys sit in the dark by a camp fire and Mike tells Scott that he’s in love with him. (The love is unrequited.) Keanu Reeves is adequate as Scott. His shallowness works to the extent that Scott will eventually forsake his street confreres and cross over to ‘normal’ and materially comfortable life – this appears to be Scott’s primary function in the story. There’s little reality to the character’s situation: it’s surprising that the son of an elected city official could work as a hustler without miring his father in public controversy. The Italian episode is one of the weakest parts of My Own Private Idaho – a designed dual heartbreak for Mike. Further away from home than ever before, he learns that his mother returned to the US and he watches Scott fall in love with a beautiful Italian girl (Chiara Caselli). Her command of English is highly variable, according to Gus Van Sant’s immediate requirements.
With the cinematographers John J Campbell and Eric Alan Edwards, Van Sant creates some resonant images of large, mostly empty landscapes. But in the closing episode on the highway, the distance between the camera and what’s happening on the ground is doubly frustrating. In the final shots a truck stops and a figure gets out of it. He lifts Mike’s unconscious body into the truck. We don’t see the driver close enough to get a sense of whether he’s a good Samaritan or something less benign. This pick-up occurs immediately after another truck has stopped on the highway. Two men get out, steal Mike’s backpack and shoes, and drive away. One of these nasty pieces of work is overplayed even in the few seconds he’s on screen. Gus Van Sant should have recorded this actor’s contribution from further away.
21 May 2016
