Review: My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Gus Van Zant's breakout feature was a sojourn with queer hustlers with very different destinies
My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Written (after Shakespeare) and directed by Gus Van Sant
I saw this movie when it came out over 30 years ago in 1991, and I remember really not Getting It. Like many road movies, “My Own Private Idaho”1 has a meandering approach to narrative, but unlike them, not an episodic one; perhaps this made it hard for me to get a grip on the story. The movie also contains impressionistic scenes in which imagery overwhelms any narrative content, and this also derails any attempt on the viewer’s part to cling to a story.
One of the main characters is Mike (River Phoenix), whom we see in the first scene standing by a lonely rural highway, then collapsing, his body half in the roadway. We’re later told that he is afflicted not by a seizure disorder but by narcolepsy. This means he falls into a deep sleep whenever he feels stressed by a situation. Given the fact that Mike had what we would now characterize as PTSD from a difficult, broken childhood, and that his sole means of support is the money he earns as a street hooker, stress causes these collapses quite often. Whenever they occur, the movie spends a few long seconds regarding his contorted, twitching body — are we sure this isn’t a seizure? — and then jumps to the moments before he awakes again.
These jumps out of and into consciousness frequently involve waking up in another locale, usually the home of someone who has picked up his inert body and taken it to a safer place. Occasionally he wakes up abandoned just where he fell or slumped over. And the moments when he’s awake are none too comfortable either. He’s part of a ragged community of gutter punks who live in a boarded-up Portland, Ore. hotel, along with a Falstaffian figure (played by William Richert) who is their leader.
More about Bob, the gang’s chief, in a moment; but first there’s Scott (Keanu Reeves). He’s another hustler, a member of the gang who asserts that Bob is his “true father,” and a close friend and occasional protector of Mike. But unlike Mike and the other teenaged street urchins, Scott doesn’t have an addiction or a trauma or a disability; in fact, he really isn’t one of them. He’s the son of Portland’s mayor and is on the verge of coming into his inheritance. Bob stupidly assumes that Scott will share this bounty with him and the gang when the time comes, and maybe that is the reason he and the real punks let him hang around; the other reason is that he is a charismatic guy, and in the realm of the personality-challenged, bereft gutter punks, the most clear-minded is king — or at least a king-in-waiting.
Viewers with more than a passing familiarity with Shakespeare will, around this point in the film, cotton on to the fact that Bob is a literal Falstaff; his character and his relation to Scott are modern iterations of the character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV history plays. And in case you didn’t get it yet, Bob speaks in language adapted from Falstaff’s lines, and Keanu Reeves in lines derived from the Prince Hal character — a genuine king-in-waiting.
This may sound over-precious. But in fact, the scenes that echo Shakespeare are the most lively in the film. And one doesn’t have to be familiar with the Henry IV plays at all to both understand the movie’s Shakespeare-derived dialogue or to enjoy it. (Wikipedia’s page on Shakespeare’s Falstaff2 will explain it quite clearly for viewers of the film.) Writer-director Gus Van Sant restages the scene from Henry IV Part 1 in which Falstaff leads his band of thieves in an attempt to rob another gang. As in the play, Prince Hal/Scott, accompanied by Mike, breaks off from the group and, after the initial theft of the other gang’s loot, disguise themselves and rob the robbers.
It’s all great fun, but when the film returns to its normal milieu and what turns out to be its actual theme — unreliable parent figures in the lives of both Scott and Mike — the forward thrust stalls. A search for Mike’s long-lost mother eventually leads them to Italy, where their partnership goes off the rails. All they have to go on is the woman's last known address. Off they go to this remote Italian farmhouse, and guess what, Mike's mother was there a year ago but departed, this time without leaving a forwarding address.
Scott makes the best of it by falling in love with the young woman who lives there, has a lot of sex with her, abandons Mike, and takes her back to Portland. There, having turned 21, Scott now has access to the estate of his father, who has obligingly died, and transforms himself from a gutter punk into a sharply dressed rich kid. Mike makes his way back to Portland as well, to Bob's redoubt; but rejected by the now moved-on-up Scott, Bob has also kicked the bucket.
That’s the story. Its end lacks a satisfying resolution, and in fact the characters have no arc. Scott goes from slumming scion to actual scion; Mike’s character (and affliction) don’t change or improve. Like most road movies, these standard narrative concerns are less important than the scenery — at least, the rural scenery of Idaho or Italy — and the minor characters met along the way. Mike has a recurring client, a German named Hans (Udo Kier), who is just as simultaneously icy and outrageous as the theater director Roger DeVries in “The Producers.” Hans performs a crazy lip-synced dance to a German disco number that is practically worth the price of admission. But like most of the film’s drama, the musical number is choked off before it ends when Scott impatiently pulls the hi-fi’s plug out of the wall.
At this point you might be thinking that “no climax” would be a suitable theme for a movie about gay hustlers, but that’s not made much of, either. Van Sant isn’t interested in story, not in this movie anyway. What does he spend time on, then? Chiefly the interactions between Mike and Scott, the ambivalence that is a necessary component where older teenagers haven’t quite decided whether they’re gay or what. I will say that, despite the lack of standard elements of narrative and character development, I was never bored. While neither Reeves nor Phoenix are great actors, I couldn’t stop watching them. This pleasure must be due to Van Sant’s own fascination with the young men. If he couldn’t stop watching, neither can we.
Despite the film’s title having been inspired by the chorus of a ten-year-old B-52s song, the events of the film do not seem to have been inspired by the lyrics of “Private Idaho,” nor does the song appear on the film’s soundtrack.