My Own Private Idaho

The second film by Gus Van Sant, "Drugstore Cowboy," was something like a daydream. Images of the mundane were intruded upon by images of the strange, the inexplicable, and the absurd. With "My Own Private Idaho"-now out on Blu-ray via the Criterion Collection-the storied queer auteur turned his eye to another stage of sleep. His subject is Mike (River Phoenix,) a gay street hustler" suffering from narcolepsy. He's prone to passing out on the conspicuously open roads that serve as this film's setting. By alternating between the blown-out light of day and the dimly-exhibited homes and bedrooms of Mike's clients, Van Sant disorients us with color palette alone. We're right there with Mike-processing the changes in consciousness, and working to keep our eyes wide open.

Mike is always waking up in strange places-his life has ellipses like a novel or film. One of the people always waking him up from these fade-outs is fellow hustler Scott (Keanu Reeves.) Mike has something for Scott-for his kind eyes and kinder voice, for his studied tone and cultured sensibility. Problem is that Scott is straight (the sex scenes are stunning works of disassociation; with Van Sant offering us only still images to pore over,) and only spends his nights alongside men because they pay well for the privilege. Together they turn tricks, spend time with their elder hustler Bob, run away from their pasts, and toward their futures. A stopgap in the eponymous state sends Mike toward his mother, abroad in Italy. And Scott has his own secrets: he's on an inexorable road toward an inheritance from his father. It'll bring money and social status with it-and with that, an end to Scott's days of disrepute.

There's an antiquated air to Scott's narrative, with his being a man of privilege who breaks the working-class hearts of the men he meets while sowing his wild oats. That's antiquated for a reason. It's Shakespeare by way of Orson Welles-"Chimes at Midnight," to be exact. Many sequences in "Idaho" adapt the same texts that Welles handled in "Chimes," which itself dramatized scenes between Prince Hal and Falstaff, collected from a number of otherwise separate works. So Scott is our Hal-the future Henry V-while Bob plays the pitiable Falstaff.

These scenes, performed with translations of the Bard's original dialogue, at first seem to be a detached comment on the other moments of the film. But as the dichotomous chasms collect-the separations between night and day, between the conscious and the subconscious, between public space and private space, upper-class and lower-class, sexual fluidity and sexual rigidity-we come to accept these Shakespearean sequences as yet another shift in a film that's defined by them. It's another waking dream.

Criterion's Blu-ray release of Van Sant's third film carries over the extra features that were created for prior DVD releases. For starters there's an hourlong conversation between Van Sant and fellow filmmaker Todd Haynes (it plays as audio-only, over clips and photos from the film itself, in the style of an audio commentary,) where the two auteurs discuss various elements of "Private Idaho." (That includes casting, blocking, and Udo Kier.) Two mid-length documentaries then consider the film through interviews with other figures: "The Making of My Own Private Idaho" speaks to three crewmembers (production designer David Brisben and cinematographers Eric Alan Edwards and John Campbell) about their experience working on the film, while "Kings of the Road" (which speaks to film scholar Paul Arthur) goes through the Rolodex of references that Van Sant employed in making this movie-including an extended passage on "Chimes at Midnight."

Other conversations are also offered, to provide further context for Van Sant's deliriously oneiric film. The late River Phoenix is represented by his sister Rain, who spends 20 minutes talking with producer Laurie Parker about her brother's work, life, and interests. Another conversation, between writer J.T. LeRoy and filmmaker Jonathan Caouette, is also included. (Another inclusion worth noting: the disc is accompanied by a large booklet which features writing by Van Sant, Amy Taubin, and Lance Loud.) The final extra features included on the disc are six deleted scenes. Fans will surely want to take these in-one of them even patches up one of the narrative's most vexing ambiguities. But you leave them appreciating Van Sant's leaving the film itself a hazy experience. He never lets us wake all the way up.

"My Own Private Idaho"
Blu-ray
Criterion.com
$39.95