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MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO
Directed & Written by: Gus Van Sant.
Produced by: Laurie Parker.
Director of Photography: Eric Alan Edwards.
Edited by: Curtiss Clayton.
Music by: Bill Stafford.
Released by: Criterion Collection.
Country of Origin: USA. 104 min. Rated: R.
With: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo & William Richert.
DVD Features: Audio interview with Gus Van Sant & director Todd Haynes. The Making of My Own Private Idaho. "Kings of the Road," film scholar Paul Arthur discussing Van Sant's adaptation of Orson Welles & Shakespeare. Audio conversation between producer Laurie Parker & filmmaker Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation). Deleted Scenes. Trailer. A 64-page booklet featuring essays by JT LeRoy, film critic Amy Taubin, a 1991 article by Lance Loud, and reprinted interviews with Van Sant, Phoenix & Reeves.

In Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche (1985) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), men have sex with other men. But their actions are as much a function of class, power, and race, as they are of same-sex attraction. Even in the satirical Drug Store Cowboy (1989) and To Die For (1995), Van Sant is concerned with down-and-out, possibly drug-addicted outsiders who live their lives, sensitively, at society's edge.

With such a focus it's not surprising Van Sant has worked with untrained actors, most notably in Elephant (2003). In an interview on the new DVD edition of Idaho, Van Sant reveals to fellow gay director Todd Haynes he considered using only non-actors for Idaho. But then Keanu Reeves, pin-up star in search of an art project, came on board, and not far behind him, the talented River Phoenix. Non-actors were cast in supporting roles.

All this, plus Van Sant's penchant for tapping sources as disparate as road movies, Westerns, and Shakespeare's Henry IV, makes My Own Private Idaho the most Gus Van Sant of Gus Van Sant films. It is also one of the most trying. The Henry IV narrative slowly, very slowly, gives way to a story in which male hustlers Mike (Phoenix) and Scott (Reeves) hit the road in search of Mike's long-lost mother. There are poetic passages: time-lapse photography of the open road, cloud-streaked skies, a salmon-hopping river. But Reeves' performance is painfully awkward. (Poor Reeves, he seems to have understood the conceit, but speaks his lines poorly and looks uncomfortable before the camera.)

There are flashes of brilliance. While helping Mike search for his elusive mother, Scott inherits his father's money and political stature, smartly returning us to the Henry IV narrative. He leaves behind Falstaff - here a character named Bob (William Richert) - and his merry band of male hustlers, as well as Mike, who is in love with him. A wonderfully ironic and true-to-the-subject note is struck in a society scene when the camera pans past one of Scott’s ex-tricks. Characters - in this case hustlers posing for adult magazines - address the audience just as characters in Shakespeare do. And dialogue neatly encapsulates Van Sant's concerns:

Scott: I only sleep with guys for money. Besides, two guys can't love each other.

Mike: I dunno, I could ... I love you and you don't pay me.

My Own Private Idaho, does, by Hollywood standards, go out on a limb, but those interviewed in the DVD extras - crew members, admirers, and, yes, a scholar - tend to overstate its execution, and do so pretentiously. Idaho was Van Sant's third outing as a filmmaker. But it tends to be sophomoric, despite the earnestness.

The deleted scenes on the DVD are fragments, except for two: one develops the Henry IV narrative quite nicely except, again, for Reeves, and another features Mike and Scott howling like wolves beside the same fire where Mike confesses his love. The Haynes/Van Sant interview and another between Idaho producer Laurie Parker and River's sister and actress Rain Phoenix are interesting and not quite so inflated. The accompanying booklet is also a mix of quality and overstatement, and ends with two reprinted interviews in which River Phoenix reveals an intelligence that was surprisingly mature for a man then in his early twenties and now, sadly, gone to an end we can easily imagine for Idaho's Mike.

Steven Cordova, contributing editor and poet (Slow Dissolve, Momotombo Press)
May 20, 2005

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