A lesser actor could not have handled the candidness, sensuality, and interiority required in filmmaker Gus Van Sant\u2019s modernized mashup of Shakespeare\u2019s Henry<\/em> plays with a story about young hustlers scraping together a survival. Phoenix might have had decades full of promise ahead of him, but life rarely goes as planned. And so much has been written about the actor who died too young, and whether they were written before or after that 1993 Halloween night in The Viper Room, they often followed a similar format. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In September 1991, in a New York Times<\/em> profile titled \u201cRiver Phoenix Is Not Just The Boy Next Door<\/a>,\u201d Karen Schoemer quoted Van Sant: \u201cRiver is the archetype of the young male lead.\u201d The rest of the piece plays out like this: River is talented, River is sensitive, River\u2019s childhood was \u201catypical,\u201d River is close to his family, River\u2019s future is bright. In November 1993, in a eulogy-style piece published a week after Phoenix\u2019s death and subtitled \u201cWhy Phoenix Wasn\u2019t Like the Other Boys<\/a>,\u201d Alex Ross wrote in The Washington Post<\/em>, \u201che had an instinctive sense for what kinds of characters and actions were missing from modern Hollywood, and how he could take up the slack.\u201d The rest of the piece plays out like this: River was<\/em> talented, River was<\/em> sensitive, River\u2019s childhood was <\/em>\u201catypical,\u201d River was<\/em> close to his family, River\u2019s future was <\/em>bright. A before, and an after. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe it seems like Schoemer and Ross were saying different things: The former arguing that Phoenix was at the zenith of his profession and establishing what the best could be, while the latter argued that zenith was the outlier among many lessers than. (The fact that Ross takes swipes at other actors in his piece lamenting Phoenix\u2019s death, including calling Phoenix\u2019s My Own Private Idaho<\/em> costar Keanu Reeves \u201ccretinous,\u201d is a Real Crappy Choice.) But look closer at those headlines, and notice their commonality: Their insistence that River was different<\/em>. That\u2019s certainly true; few young actors made as instantaneous an impact as he did in Stand By Me<\/em>, The Mosquito Coast<\/em>, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade<\/em>. But is emphasizing someone\u2019s singularity, and linking him so often to boyhood, its own kind of curse? What kind of weight does that put on one\u2019s shoulders? What protection did we fail to offer? If our collective instinct was to call Phoenix a \u201cboy,\u201d are we partially to blame for his few brief years as a man? <\/p>\n\n\n\n * This is an essay about My Own Private Idaho<\/em>, which is to say \u2026 yes, this is still, in part, another essay about River Phoenix. There is no way to discuss this film without discussing the actor, who winds My Own Private Idaho<\/em> around himself like the wide-open roads that bookend its opening and closing scenes. Phoenix stars as young sex worker Mikey Waters. By day, he pals around with other street kids (young men and a few young women, sometimes homeless, sometimes struggling with addiction, sometimes gay or bisexual or queer). By night, he goes on \u201cdates,\u201d mostly with older clients who demand myriad different things from his body (a man for whom he puts on a schoolboy-style outfit and cleans; a woman with whom he slow dances). And at any time, he could collapse into a narcoleptic seizure and accompanying deep sleep. The stress of his reality, the anxiety of performing sexually, and the memories of his fraught childhood, which play out like gauzy, fragmented Super 8 films, are all causes for his narcoleptic episodes. So Mikey cycles through life on, as he describes it, always the same road\u2014a road that looks like a face. Singular, but familiar; wide-open, but closed off. Maybe he\u2019ll end up somewhere different from Idaho, where he grew up and hopes to locate his missing mother, or Seattle or Portland, where he sells access to his body for enough money to eat. But life is more about repetition than not, and the grooves and fissures of Mikey\u2019s reality are etched deep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mikey\u2019s life is half of My Own Private Idaho<\/em>, and the other half is a spin on Shakespeare\u2019s Henry IV, Part 1<\/em>, Henry IV, Part 2<\/em>, and Henry V<\/em> trio of plays. Reeves (in the same year as Point Break<\/em>, and before more period-piece work in Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/em> and Much Ado About Nothing<\/em>) stars as Hal stand-in Scott Favor, the son of Portland\u2019s mayor. On his 21st birthday, Scott will receive a sizable familial inheritance\u2014and before then, he\u2019s doing everything he can to piss his father off. He mocks, pranks, flirts with, and one-ups middle-aged mentor\/Falstaff analogue Bob Pigeon (William Richert), in one second, sneering of Bob, \u201cHe was fucking in love with me,\u201d and in another breath boasting, \u201cI love Bob more than my father.\u201d But Scott isn\u2019t gay, he insists. He just has sex with men for money, which is a distinction of a kind. With Scott\u2019s years of living on the street, he serves as the young punk leader of a group of street kids played by the likes of Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Van Sant\u2019s friend Mike Parker<\/a>, who was to star in the film before Phoenix joined. And he loves Mikey, and he knows Mikey is in love with him, and there is a deep ocean of agony and anguish between the gap in platonic<\/em> and romantic<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201890s were a time of adventurous, experimental, refreshingly weird Shakespeare adaptations (Baz Luhrmann\u2019s Romeo + Juliet<\/em>, Julie Taymor\u2019s Titus<\/em>, Michael Almereyda\u2019s Hamlet<\/em><\/a>, which yes, came out in 2000, but is pure pre-Y2K in its vibe<\/em>, man), and My Own Private Idaho<\/em> certainly ranks among them. This is Van Sant revving up for the campy delight of To Die For<\/em> and the melancholy effectiveness of Good Will Hunting<\/em>, and My Own Private Idaho<\/em> exists somewhere between those two later projects. Udo Kier doing a cabaret-style lip synch? Unexpectedly entertaining! Reeves cradling Phoenix\u2019s body at the base of a statue decorated with the phrase \u201cTHE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN\u201d? Cheekily affecting! How the two mirror each other\u2019s loose-limbed dusting-off movements after disembarking from Scott\u2019s motorcycle? Uncannily synchronous! A lengthy mid-film sequence in which hustlers played by real street kids, like Parker, stare slightly away from the camera and recount in detail their experiences of abuse and assault? Unforgettably harrowing! And what makes this unlikely combination gel at all is the perfect duality of Phoenix and Reeves, and the contrasting vivacity they bring to their roles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis road will never end.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/my-own2-1024x683.jpg\")
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