My Own Private Idaho

365 Films

Entry #59

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Directed by Gus Van Sant

To steal an analogy from the Eels’ Mark Oliver Everett, if Drugstore Cowboy was Gus Van Sant’s greeting card to the world, then My Own Private Idaho was the phone call at three am that nobody wanted to answer.  Idaho is the conclusion of an unofficial trilogy preceded by Cowboy and beginning with his first feature, Mala Noche.  The idea of an unofficial trilogy would come back to Van Sant later in his career with the ultra conceptual death trilogy consisting of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days.  Although, if you want to get really technical with the whole thing, that second trilogy is really a quadrilogy when you include 2007’s Paranoid Park.  The point of all this is to begin to examine Van Sant the storyteller in relation to Van Sant the provocateur.  While he may not have been as outrageous as some of his contemporaries, in his own quiet way, his films really helped changed the face of cinema.  He took bigger and bolder visual risks with Idaho and the narrative conceit of adapting Shakespeare for modern day male hustlers in the Pacific Northwest is a gamble that threatens to throw the film off-balance, but ultimately reveals its vital purpose at the end.  In expanding the scope and ambition of his two previous films, Van Sant created a unique calibration between the head and the heart.  What’s most striking about it is how masterfully Van Sant re-creates the subjective experience of the main character, Mike as played by River Phoenix.  We feel the untethered and whimsical nature of his thoughts and his bouts of narcolepsy give the story structure the free-floating form of his own sub conscious.  Van Sant has always been attracted to the idea of a group of outsiders attempting to form their own community and if necessary traveling somewhere completely new and different to do so.  That being said, I am hard pressed to think of another film he’s done that feels as much like a raw nerve as this one, or where that theme has been applied as successfully.  The grumblings about this film complain of the overly accentuated construction of the Shakespeare adaptation but in revisiting the film, it is my understanding that without this subplot and Keanu Reeves’ performance, the film would lose part of that necessary emotional element.   The character of Scott is the wealthy scion of the Mayor of Portland whose engagement with street hustling is merely a performance designed to piss off the powers that be in his family.  Inherent in the idea of performance is that the façade may be dropped at a moment’s notice for it is not real.  Mike does not understand this and comes to see Scott as his personal and romantic savior.  Thus, the devolution of their friendship is all the more heartbreaking when we finally see, at the end, what completely different universes these two inhabit.  Scott has the beautiful girlfriend and the limousine, while Mike is left to pass out on the side of the road he’s seen thousands of times before in his life.  The eerie maliciousness and cruelty of Reeves’ final scene renders this division so palpable that the mind races to wonder how these two would have ever wound up together in the first place, yet it seemed to make such perfect sense at the time.  My Own Private Idaho is the outsider Americana road trip at its most tender and compassionate.  That sounds pretty revolutionary to me.