My Own Private Idaho

615 10-17-91
It isn't every day that someone freely adapts Shakespeare's Henry IV plays into a hallucinatory movie about male hustlers with a mostly gay clientele in Portland, Oregon. But writer-director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy) has done just that in this tragicomedy about two boys -- Mike (River Phoenix) and Scott (Keanu Reeves) -- whose only sense of family comes from the streets. Mike, a narcoleptic, dreams of finding his lost mother, while Scott, the updated Prince Hal, rejects his politician father. Their only parental figure is Bob, a leering, ragtag Falstaff played by Winter Kills director William Richert. Bob raves about hearing "the chimes at mid-night," while Scott compares time to "a fair hustler in black leather" and Mike (who talks normal Van Santese) pretends not to notice when this fractured rhetoric periodically stops the picture cold.

Van Sant and the Bard are the oddest and uneasiest screen alliance since Paul Anka borrowed from Beethoven for the title song of The Longest Day. But the film's astonishing beauty more than compensates. From the first shot, which shows Mike passed out on an Idaho road, the film tantalizes us with imagery: churning clouds, swimming salmon, Mike in his mother's arms, a barn collapsing and Mike waking up in a chair just as a john's mouth brings him to orgasm. Amazingly, these surreal fragments are neither pretentious nor repugnant, thanks to Van Sant's light, mischievous touch.

Van Sant's cleareyed, unsentimental approach to a plot that pivots on betrayal and death is reflected in magnetic performances from Reeves and Phoenix, who is acutely poignant when Mike tells Scott he loves him. Van Sant juggles more allusions to art, literature, music, films and his own life than most audiences can handle. But before this trippy, mesmerizing movie swerves out of control, it delivers an exhilarating and challenging ride.

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(Posted: Dec 8, 2000)