[7]
River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves co-star in Gus Van Sant’s Shakespearean street odyssey about two hustlers who quest from Portland, Oregon to Rome, Italy in search of the mother who abandoned Phoenix when he was a baby. Reeves’ character, meanwhile, is on the verge of inheriting the fortune of his father, the mayor — a windfall that is expected to elevate the lives of Phoenix and their hustler brethren, including Bob (William Richert), a boisterous surrogate father character to them all.
My Own Private Idaho is an odd experimental sort of film that mish-mashes dueling storylines far more effectively than you might imagine. Reeves loosens up here more than any other film in his early career, but it’s Phoenix who really shines in one of his last great performances before his untimely death in 1993. He almost reminds us of James Dean with his sullen introspection and inner strife. Van Sant (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy) avoids sentimentality like the plague, so any emotional reading of My Own Private Idaho comes almost exclusively from Phoenix’s performance and a touching, single campfire scene in which Phoenix nervously professes his love for Reeves character. Their relationship is never explored more deeply than that — at least not in words — and it’s destined to remain unrequited.
Phoenix’s storyline, including his and Reeves’ adventure to find his mother, feels more grounded and dramatically rewarding than the rest of the film. Reeves’ inheritance plot and the scenes involving the Bob father figure are written in an off-putting, highly stylized way, including a great deal of dialogue lifted straight out of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. The result is a film that skips and dances playfully and creatively over its deeper, dramatic potential. It’s nevertheless a very original and intriguing film, boosted by interludes of whimsical, time-lapse photography, and sequences of absurdist humor. Comic highlights include porno magazine covers of Reeves and Phoenix that come to life to dole out exposition to the audience, and a cabaret number performed by quirky German cult actor Udo Kier.
With James Russo, Chiara Caselli, Tom Troupe, Grace Zabriskie, and Flea.