Critics reviews

I didn’t know what it was that I had just seen; it didn’t make much sense. It felt like a spell, opening with the light falling on a definition in a dictionary, the film that followed was about that moment when one slips out of language, unwillingly.

A dense and personal film with an engulfing sadness. . . . My Own Private Idaho stands as Van Sant’s first artistic peak, a perfect synthesis of formal inventiveness and narrative generosity.

At least once a year I find myself revisiting My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant's narcoleptic rent boy road movie. I'm an avid River Phoenix fan, yes (I have devoured anything and everything related to the broody actor since my teens, an obsession that amuses and confuses my friends and family), but it's the beautiful humanism of Idaho that stays with me.

Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho is a jagged, episodic film that's all of a piece by sheer force of will, existing as a collection of conceits, gambits, and gimmicks that are bundled together by a through line of longing. It's Van Sant's freest film, offering the illusion of having arisen fully formed from the ether of its maker's consciousness.

Most people would place My Own Private Idaho (1991), Van Sant's third feature, in the triumph category... The seeds of his subsequent wild variability, however, were originally sown here. In truth, My Own Private Idaho is two separate films inelegantly stitched together, only one of which is first-rate. The other stems from the same sort of harebrained idea that led to a laughable shot of Norman Bates frantically jerking off.

In addition to pop-art playfulness, road movie, love story, documentary and Western tropes, the director even finds time to riff (jarringly, but arrestingly) on Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, most obviously in the form of William Richert's grandiloquent flophouse Falstaff figure. Yet thanks in large part to Phoenix's harrowingly vulnerable performance, Idaho packs a real emotional wallop.

Van Sant was so open to [Cottrell's] collaborators on this film that he often let them take the lead, and this led to bravura things like the Daddy Carroll sequence but also to a fatal unevenness, lopsidedness and lack of focus. This is a difficult film to consider as a whole, or as the invention of only one person, but so much of what works in it works so strongly that My Own Private Idaho is a seminal movie for many people. It certainly has been for me.

My Own Private Idaho is first and foremost a road movie. It's also a loose adaptation of parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV and V in which a homeless kingpin replaces a portly knight and a gay street hustler stands in for to the heir to the throne. If this all sounds exceptionally strange, even for Van Sant, it is. But it's also one of his most visually sophisticated outings to date, as well as an exceedingly interesting take on (and departure from) its source material.

It is unclear in such moments how aware the players (and I use this term emphatically instead of "characters") are of the theatricality of their actions, or if this is pure realism in their cosmos. Tableaux are latent everywhere, even in the non-"Shakespearean" scenes, and though players within the frame do move, there is something intangibly static about these shots that seems to drain life and reality from the frame.

One doesn't look at the film and see the nightmare of an unprotected life: one sees young people enjoying themselves being irresponsible and living without parental authority. It doesn't seem like such a hard-knock life: though there are a couple of painful accounts of bad dates by real hustlers, the movie is remarkably without panic or sharp edges.

Released in 1991, Idaho was Van Sant's third feature film and remains his most anarchic and, in many ways, ambitious. It's certainly the film where his art school sensibility and the postmodernist aesthetics that dominated the art world during the seventies and eighties are most in play.

Gus Van Sant searched for and found a new vocabulary in this utterly seminal, decade-defining punk of a movie, as restless, densely inhabited, and full of half-cocked brilliance as a tweak house in springtime.