MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO is a film by Gus Van Sant. It stars River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, William Reichert, and Udo Kier. It was written and directed by Van Sant, "with additional dialogue by William Shakespeare." Rated R, due to strong language and nudity.
MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO very much continues the themes of Gus Van Sant's two previous feature-length films, MALA NOCHE and DRUGSTORE COWBOY, that of the important lives of the marginalized in our society. MALA NOCHE was about a gay store clerk in Portland's Skid Road who falls in love with an illegal Mexican immigrant; the love is returned by exploitation, and in the end it is an open question of who was exploiting whom (among other open questions). DRUGSTORE COWBOY, something of a commercial success, profiled the lives of a three young junkies, people who liked to get high more than anything else. MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO is concerned with two male hustlers and their two searches for what was missing in their lives. These movies are odysseys, seedy road pictures. Unfortunately, I don't think MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO is as successful overall, as it predecessors, especially the miraculous MALA NOCHE.
This is not to say that MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO does not have some wonderful qualities, some memorable moments, but it also has lapses, and the whole movie fails to come together for me with the kind of cohesiveness of the other movies.
The casting is certainly strong. River Phoenix is truly wonderful as the gay hustler, Mike Waters, from whose point of view we mostly see the movie. Phoenix gives us a performance that is completely committed to his character. Waters is sweet, damaged, naive, funny, and sad; he's also a severe narcoleptic, who is seized by a irresistible sleep when he's under stress. He has to survive his affliction to hustle his johns (such Stanley Hainesworth and Udo Kier) and an occasional woman. She reminds him of his long lost mother (Grace Zabriskie) and zonks out before he can even strip. As his best friend, Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) says: "Some hustler, huh?"
Reeves' Favor deserves a lengthier discussion than is appropriate for this brief notice. Favor has sex with men for the money; he says if you give it away you start to become a "fairy," a quality that would not fit into his long-term goals. His character is guarded, even as he is Waters' guardian. Favor is a rich boy who is hustling mostly to piss off his dad the mayor of Portland. Favor also is the subject some of the most audacious chance-taking I've seen for a long time in a movie. The movie draws a very direct comparison between Favor and Prince Hal of Shakespeare's HENRY IV Parts I and II. The Falstaff (cum Fagin), Bob Pigeon, is played by the director of WINTER KILLS, William Reichert. The two of them exchange dialog lifted from Shakespeare and updated to include references to leather and gay bars and such. It is this device, this conceit of Van Sant's, that makes or breaks MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO. I felt it broke it; for me it did not work, it never got above the level of a cute idea. To have Favor like Hal, to have Pigeon like Falstaff, would have been one thing, but to have them talk in blank verse in quite another.
Van Sant was daring throughout MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO and cannot be faulted for that. Better that he should try and occasionally stumble than never chance anything, like most directors. Among the things that worked: the remarkable and witty visualization of an orgasm; the wall of gay skin mags, whose covers start talking to us and to each other; the tableaux vivants for the sex scenes (with hurdy-gurdy accompaniment). He also gives us some plain, old-fashioned wonderful movie moments, such as Mike and Scott talking over a campfire, with Mike finally getting something off his chest that he's wanted to say for a long time, or the Udo Kier's wonderful dance with a table lamp. But with the Shakespearean dialog, I think he overreached his grasp, as the saying goes. It is also a story that is divided into at least three stories, all of which rambled picaresquely. We have the search for Water's mother, we have the story of Prince Hal/Scott Favor story, and we have the story of street hustlers centered around Pigeon qua Fagin. Any one of these could have been a movie by itself and the end result of such richness is not, unfortunately, greater richness for the audience but instead a scattered and unfocused movie experience.
Van Sant gives us an interesting looking movie, however, thanks to cinematographers Eric Alan Edwards and John Campbell, as well as interesting sounding movie due to composer Bill Stafford.
I can recommend MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO mostly to fans who already know Van Sant. And to those fans, let me recommend the matinee prices. To those of you who haven't discovered Van Sant yet, there is a lot here and you will be rewarded for taking a chance, but look up his older work, too.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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