FILM

Rip It Up, Issue 184, 1 November 1992, Page 38

FILM

MV OWN PRIVATE IDAHO Director: Gus van Sant PATRIOT GAMES Director: Philip Noyce Gus van Sant became a hot property at the end of the 80s with his first feature, Drugstore Cowboy, a morally unflustered road movie about the young junkie set and it's John Schlesinger's 1969 film Midnight Cowboy that is evoked with his latest offering, My Own Private Idaho. 7-“ - .. This time arou'nd we meet Mike (River Phoenix), a shiftless young hooker, staggering through life, haunted by his past and his narcoleptic

present — much is made of the character's tendency to fall into a quivering coma when emotional stress gets the better of him. Mike's central relationship is with another hooker, Scott (Keanu Reeves), who just happens to be the rebellious son of the Mayor of Portland. Inevitably, when the crunch comes, Reeves easily slips back into a life of privilege, and Phoenix ends up on the Idaho highway: on the surface it has all elements of soapish melodrama that would have appealed to Douglas Sirk or Fassbinder. But this tough, engaging film sets its two main characters firmly on the streets, a milieu that brings forth the most daring (and controversial) aspect of the movie — the constant echoing of dialogue from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 (it's difficult to resist a chuckle at the lines "additional dialogue by William Shakespeare" in credits — not the first time that the Bard has been treated thus on the silver screen). Although the father-son relationship between Reeves and Tom Troupe has Shakespearian echoes, most of these are centred around William Richert's Bob, a giant amongst men, and a genial Falstaff figure. If Van Sant's tribute is indeed as much intended for Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight as for the Shakespearian original, then Richert is superb and very Wellesian; but Reeves' Prince Hal is an insipid link in the chain, a failing brought most forcefully home in his limp rejection of Bob towards the end of the film.

There is much poetry in My Own Private Idaho: the eerie, unsettling homemovie flashbacks underlining Mike's obsession with his mini-skirted mother, the long stretch of Idaho highway that the young men keep getting drawn back to, a landscape topped with clouds that hurtle across the sky in time lapse photography. Salmon leap upstream in a recurring image paralleling Mike trying to return to his roots (his search for his mother even takes the two men to Italy for what is the least satisfactory section of the film). I'm still making up my mind whether the two lovemaking sequences presented in a series of posed stills are inspired by art or coyness, but there are some delightful moments of camp humour. One of these has the cover models on a wall of porn magazines come to life in a Hollywood Squares type conversation, another has Udo Keir, whose feline body and chiselled physiognomy graced many a Films and Film-

ing in the late 60s, doing a bizarre disco number with motel table lamp. Watch out too for a scene that could have come from Ken Russell's Whore, in which Phoenix scrubs the floor in a kitsch Dutch Boy costume, while his tricks squirms with delight to Rudy Vallee's 'Deep Night'. The music is neatly chosen, right through to the play out on the Pogues' 'The Old Main Drag', although Bill Stafford's pedal steel crooning 'America the Beautiful' every few minutes becomes a little strained in its ironic significance '— this is more what we might expect from the heavyhanded Schlesinger. Despite what some might see as self-indulgences, My Own Private Idaho does attempt to present some of the realities of the street (although snatches of cinema verite interviews with hustlers' are deliberately fragmented). River Phoenix's performance as the derelict Mike is perfect to the last tremor, his fireside confession of love to Reeves, although resolved in tactful shadows, intensely moving. It's a brave stand for the actor, and wil hopefully have a major impact in the questioning of the deep-set homophobia in the mainstream movie industry. Stand By Me it ain't. If there's one group that Hollywood has traditionally hated more than homosexuals, it's Russians, and, with the recent detente, the studios must be straining to find PC villains. A few years back Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October got away with Russian nasties, because most of us, reared on 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, have always had a soft spot for submarine perils.

Patriot Games is the second Clancy thriller to be filmed, this time by the director who gave us the aptly titled Dead Calm. Harrison Ford is the stalwart Jack Ryan, a CIA man in London, who gets inadvertently involved with an attack on personnages royal by a radical splinter group from the IRA. The movie, perhaps the kick-off for a series with Jack Ryan as the new James Bond, had its production problems, with Ford replacing Alec* Baldwin and writer Clancy bitterly denouncing the film in press. The last 50 seconds of the confrontation between

Ford and the chief villain was even re-shot after previews. What finally turns up on screen for Paramount's whopping $42.5 (it goes without saying that Idaho would have cost a fraction of this figure) is a very ordinary thriller. The villains are stick figures and Harrison, considering what a dab hand he is with repartee, has remarkably few words to bandy about. Perhaps the cloying family setting (with eye surgeon wife Anne Archer and precocious daughter Thora Birch) was an inhibiting factor.

Earlier this year the outspoken Ford was looking over his career, defending Mike Henry and, in the same breath dismissing Blade Runner as something that -'could have been more than a cult picture'. Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast '"may have been more properly a literary rather than a cinematic excercise" and the main discussion point about Presumed Innocent was Ford's haircut. One wonders how the actor might assess Patriot Games in , a few years time. :

WILLIAM DART