Gus Van Sant’s eclectic filmography has taken a winding road, through experimental
independents and mainstream award-winners.
From the very beginning, though, there’s one subject he has returned to, over and over:
marginalized young men, [some like himself gay, some straight,] all struggling to find
their way in the world.
From junkies and dropouts, to high schoolers and undercover geniuses, these outsiders are
figuratively, sometimes even literally, lost in America.
And perhaps the most resonant of all of his lost boys, is Mike Waters in 1991’s My Own
Private Idaho.
Mike, a narcoleptic prone to sudden sleeping fits, is a homeless hustler.
His buddy, Scott, is merely playing the part; an errant mayor’s son dabbling in misadventures
with rogueish mentor Bob Pigeon until he returns to his rightful, chosen place in society.
Though Mike and Scott follow similar paths for a while, they are destined to go very
separate ways.
Reflective of Van Sant’s art school and low-budget film background, his third feature,
My Own Private Idaho is a proud mongrel.
Its origins were two separate screenplays and a short story.
The title is from a B-52’s song.
There are clear allusions to American underground cinema and counter-culture New Hollywood.
The Scott and Bob / Hal and Falstaff subplot is taken from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, complete
with modified Elizabethan verse.
There are cinema verite-like inserts with non-actors recounting real tales of street
life.
It’s also, given Mike’s itinerant lifestyle, a road movie.
But it’s a revisionist one.
There’s no planned journey towards a redemptive destination here.
Like Mike, the film fits and starts, circling detours and dead-ends.
Mike’s doomed search for love and family reunion is the film’s dominant, most affecting
story.
From the outset, Van Sant puts the audience in his point of view.
And more than this, Mike’s narcolepsy, and mental fragility, often seem to guide the
film’s improvisatory narrative, and unsteady pace and rhythm.
His blackouts literally bring in new episodes.
And his seizures, often triggered by emotional overload, are the cues for Van Sant’s visual
coups:
Super 8 footage, time-lapse film, surreal flashes of associative imagery.
These are styles Van Sant had used before, and would use again, but here they feel most
integrated into his character’s psychological state.
Time speeding by without warning.
A nostalgic, perhaps self-deceptive view of the past.
Bursts of poetic, sub-conscious self-awareness, denied by waking life.
Though not all of the film’s most inventive visuals are through Mike’s perspective,
as with the brilliant and very funny adult magazine cover set piece.
As he did with Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant cast teen heartthrobs Keanu Reeves
and River Phoenix against type, and the actors gamely accepted his challenge.
Phoenix was credited with shifting Mike and Scott’s relationship into a thwarted love
story, and his campfire confessional scene is heartbreaking.
For all that the setting is the world of street hustlers, this isn’t a film about sex at all,
which perhaps accounts for the performative, clinical, cynical style of the sex scenes
– even Scott’s with his supposed lover Carmella.
Ultimately Van Sant contrasts the raw honesty of his genuinely lost boys with the convenient
hypocrisy of those only faking it.
Mike’s ultimate fate is unknown – and Phoenix’s own tragic early death makes this
even more poignant - but Van Sant’s compassionate bearing witness to his transient characters’
roads to nowhere is the closest he, and we, can come to bringing them home.