my own private idaho

I first saw My Own Private Idaho in its original release, however wide that may have been, about 30 years ago. I had to drive all the way to the Beverly Center on the westside, which suggests the release wasn’t very wide. I didn’t know what to make of it then and I don’t now.

At moments, it’s as beautiful as anything ever put on film. Wide angle shots of the Idaho landscape, decaying barns and houses, flickering firelight, reflections in a diner window, most memorably a barn falling from the sky and shattering on an empty road.

At other times it’s an unholy mess. It wasn’t clear to me, watching it again last night, whether the script is clumsy, or Gus Van Sant couldn’t afford decent talent outside of his co-stars, or just thought it would be fun to work with a bunch of local acting majors from Portland State. Or possibly, Van Sant just wasn’t very good at directing actors. Or all of the above.

The story, since you almost certainly aren’t familiar with it, is basically the Henry IV plays (and Van Sant puckishly gave William Shakespeare a credit for additional dialogue). Keanu Reeves plays the mayor’s son, slumming with a band of hustlers and thieves in an abandoned hotel on skid row. River Phoenix is one of the hustlers - an invented character; I can’t really think of anyone in Shakespeare that he maps to. There’s a Falstaff, named Bob, fat, drunk, full of bluster; from the moment he enters he’s the lord of this merry band of street folk.

Back then I was in my twenties, still newly out, living in the still-strange land of Southern California, settling uncomfortably into a life of neckties and 8:30 am meetings. Eating Budget Gourmet lasagna for dinner while I listened to Deirdre O’Donoghue’s show “SNAP” on KCRW. Running away from all that to live in an abandoned hotel in Portland seemed appealing and terrifying. Living an authentic life. I once interviewed the poet Robert Hass, who told me he had done that for a while, lived on the streets of San Francisco trying to be Kerouac. What he learned from it, he told me: “Those guys were miserable.”

Reeves succeeds as Jack, the mayor’s son, while he’s cosplaying a street kid. You can believe this rich kid isn’t quite good at pretending to be destitute; his privilege leaks out of every pore. The others don’t notice; they’re too busy drinking, yes, bottles of Falstaff and plotting petty robberies. Phoenix’s Jack might notice, but he’s too desperate for affection to care, or maybe he sees the real Jack and figures it’s going to be his ticket out. And Jack kind of can do everything; he might have a source of money but more than that he has the confidence of a well-off, mediocre white man that causes things to fall into his lap. Is it plausible that they run into a German john in a hotel in Boise? Not especially, but it’s plausible that it would happen to that kind of a swell.

But then again, that’s kind of Reeves’s brand - both not acting especially convincingly and having the confidence of a strikingly handsome prep school dropout. Where the script - Van Sant’s or Shakespeare’s - asks him to soar, he gamely slams into twentieth story windows. But he cuts a nice figure whether in street clothes or a three-piece suit.

Or maybe the script wants to soar and crashes on takeoff. Or maybe Van Sant doesn’t know what to do with talent. It’s hard to know what might have been.

River Phoenix, though. River Phoenix. My goodness. So sensitive, so vulnerable, so versatile, so available for every emotion a scene demanded. Actors, I think - all performers maybe, dancers and singers too, but for now actors - if they’re doing the work, strip themselves naked for us and we expect it, demand it. And filming ends, the curtain drops, who’s there to put them back together again? What a loss.

Walking away as the credits rolled, I was reminded of the way one of my grad school professors summed up Frank Norris’s novel McTeague. “Norris is such a clumsy novelist,” he said. “How many times do we need to read the words ‘NON-TOXIC PAINT’ in scare quotes? And yet his writing is so powerful.”

I’m glad finally to have seen My Own Private Idaho on a big screen (the screen at the Beverly Center was about the size of your average living room flatscreen). It’s so affecting, despite its clumsiness. Or maybe its clumsiness is of a piece with its honesty - it’s somehow more honest than Shakespeare’s effort, possibly because Van Sant centers River Phoenix’s street kid without a future and not Keanu Reeves’s Hal. In the days of cinematic universes it feels like a bit of a miracle, really, a movie that deserved to be made, and we could use more like it.