It is to my great surprise that I am once again reviewing a movie where the third act twist is our traveling heroes stumble upon a house occupied by a lone Italian woman who one of them instantly falls for. Yes, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is, like Down By Law, a story about an unusual friendship, but more than that it’s an unique gay road movie set all over the Pacific Northwest. And more than that, it’s an unlikely, loose take on Shakespeare’s three-play Henriad. So Midnight Cowboy meets Chimes at Midnight? Sign me up!
Mike Waters (River Phoenix) is a sensitive prostitute whose livelihood (and life) are threatened by his crippling narcolepsy. Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) is Mike’s friend and a fellow hustler, albeit one with a pretty interesting deal: he’s the wayward son of the mayor of Portland and due to receive a massive inheritance upon his upcoming 21st birthday. After Mike’s narcolepsy unwittingly get him taken from Seattle to Portland, he and Scott decide to go on a journey to find the subject that haunts Mike’s dreams: his mother. So they get on a motorcycle and head to Idaho, where Mike’s brother lives.
Along the way we meet a bunch of colorful characters, most notably William Richert as Bob Pigeon, this story’s Falstaff to Scott’s Prince Hal. Bob mentors a gang of street kids (including Flea!) who live with him in an abandoned apartment building in Portland. Fans familiar with the plays will know that this relationship is headed for tragedy, although in Henry IV, Part 2, I feel it’s an important choice in every production to decide to portray Hal’s rejection as an act or suggest that it was their friendship that was always a performance. Here, because you can never guess what a Keanu Reeves character is thinking, it kind of ends totally ambiguously, which might really frustrate audiences new to this story.
The funny thing is, all the Shakespeare stuff is really on the periphery of Mike’s story. Mike’s just a lonely guy looking for love who happened to fall for Scott and ended up getting to see all this drama. That’s because Van Sant actually combined two screenplays to make this movie – Mike’s story was originally adapted from John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night while the idea to make Scott’s story into an adaptation of the Henry IV plays came later in the process, after watching Orson Welles’s aforementioned Chimes at Midnight. Normally I’m all-in on the idea of turning two half-finished ideas into one big idea, but honestly the Shakespearean scenes feel so at-odds with Mike’s quiet tragedy that I kind of feel like it would have been better to just make these as two separate movies. Which, judging by what I saw on Letterboxd, is an ice-cold take but what are you gonna do?
Anyway, it was pretty cool to see another River Phoenix movie finally, a beloved actor who really I only know as the kid Indiana Jones. He’s really great in this, and, according to Wikipedia, took this seriously enough that he even rewrite the pivotal campfire scene himself, more than doubling its length and making his character’s queerness more obvious. But you know someone who did not take My Own Private Idaho seriously? Kiefer Sutherland. This other Stand by Me star was offered the Mike role but turned it down because he already had plans to go on a ski trip. Yeah Kiefer, good call, you definitely wouldn’t have had a chance to hit the slopes while you were out in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. We barely have any nature out here.