My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

 

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

Cast: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert, Rodney Harvey, Chiara Caselli, Michael Parker, Jessica Makinson, Flea, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, Tom Troupe, Sally Curtice. Screenplay: Gus Van Sant, based on plays by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: John J. Campbell, Eric Alan Edwards. Production design: David Brisbin. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton. Music: Bill Stafford. 

When is a cult film not a cult film? The term is bandied about so often, that I have to protest when people use it about My Own Private Idaho, which seems to me to transcend the label. To my mind, a cult film is one that reaches an enthusiastic audience despite its apparent limitations as a serious work of film art. They Live, for example, John Carpenter’s 1988 movie, is a cult film because it’s part of a genre, the horror/sci-fi flick, looked down on by “serious” critics, made on a shoestring, with some really awful acting and cheesy production values, but carrying a potent subtext that continues to be appreciated by audiences years after others in its subgenre have been forgotten. What lifts My Own Private Idaho above cult level is its wit and intelligence, which should have been obvious from the start, and the sheer brilliance with which its director and actors carry off its audaciously ironic vision of what lesser filmmakers would have treated with message-movie earnestness: The lives of street hustlers. Gus Van Sant’s decision to work in an analogy with the coterie surrounding Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V is a stroke of genius. (Shakespeare is credited – tongue-in-cheek, I think – with “additional dialogue,” even though most of the borrowings are paraphrased into contemporary English.) But it’s only the most obvious of the film’s surprises, which multiply with every viewing. My Own Private Idaho will also continuously engender a sense of loss, from what may be River Phoenix’s finest performance, as the narcoleptic lost boy, hopelessly in love with Keanu Reeves’s controlled and conniving Scott, a character that makes its own wry comment on Shakespeare’s Prince Hal.

Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1986)

Tim Streeter and Doug Cooeyate in Mala Noche

Walt: Tim Streeter
Johnny: Doug Cooeyate
Roberto Pepper: Ray Monge
Betty: Nyla McCarthy

Director: Gus Van Sant
Screenplay: Gus Van Sant
Based on a story by Walt Curtis
Cinematography: John J. Campbell
Film editing: Gus Van Sant
Music: Creighton Lindsay

It occurs to me that Gus Van Sant's first feature, Mala Noche, has something in common with his best-known and most commercially successful films, Good Will Hunting (1997) and Milk (2008), both of which earned him Oscar nominations (and won Oscars for, respectively, actors Robin Williams and Sean Penn): They're all about dispossessed young men. Harvey Milk manages to overcome the political stigma of being gay, but is gunned down by a homophobe. Will Hunting emerges from South Boston as a mathematical savant, but never quite overcomes the feeling of being out of place. And Walt, the protagonist of Mala Noche, is a gay man living apparently by choice on Skid Row in Portland, working as a janitor and as a clerk in a tiny liquor store that mostly sells cheap hooch to winos. It's pretty clear that Walt is not much for impulse control: The object of his obsession, Johnny, with his long dark eyelashes and full lips, looks like a cross between Mick Jagger and a Pre-Raphaelite angel, and Walt pursues him relentlessly. Unable to get Johnny to sleep with him, Walt goes for proximity -- having rough sex with Johnny's friend Roberto. (Wouldn't a gay man have a better lube in his medicine cabinet than Vaseline?) Van Sant intentionally withholds much of Walt's backstory: We suspect from his good looks and affable, articulate manner that he comes from middle-class origins, so his slumming and his frustrated erotic obsession look like a kind of masochism. Mala Noche is no masterpiece, but it's a fascinating work of first-film ultra-low-budget ingenuity, with its location shooting, its high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, and its plausible performances by actors who were then unknown and have pretty much remained so.

The Sea of Trees (Gus Van Sant, 2015)

For a movie that attempts a "feel-good" ending, The Sea of Trees sure does spend a lot of time making you feel bad, from the moment its grim-faced protagonist, Arthur Brennan (Matthew McConaughey), arrives in Japan. He plans to kill himself in the "Suicide Forest" near Mount Fuji. But then he tries to help Takumi Nakamura (Ken Watanabe), a man he meets there, find his way out of the forest, and encounters all manner of hardships and injuries. There are also flashbacks to Arthur's troubled marriage and the death of his wife, Joan (Naomi Watts). We are plunged into one misery after another before a twist into fantasy convinces Arthur not only that life is worth living but also that love persists after death. Yet the misery dominates the tone of the film, despite three excellent actors and a well-regarded director, Gus Van Sant. Some of the blame must fall on the screenwriter, Chris Sparling, but mostly it seems to be a failure to leaven the material with anything that gives us a sense that the promise of its ending has been earned. Imagine Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) without Whoopi Goldberg and instead two hours of moping around by Demi Moore recalling life with Patrick Swayze, and you'll have a sense of the overall effect of The Sea of Trees. One major problem, I think, is in the miscasting of McConaughey as the lead. He's a very good film actor, as his Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013), his scene-stealing bit in The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013), and his work on the first season of the series True Detective (2014) amply demonstrates. But he is, I think, a character lead, terrific in roles full of wit and sass and energy, whereas what's called for in films like The Sea of Trees is a conventional romantic leading man. As hard as he works to make it plausible, his character in this film never rings true. But then not much else in the film does, either.