My Own Private Idaho [1991]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, the new year's project that is still going, end in sight.

Do people that choose "gym" for their new years resolution (and stick with it for the year) flop awkwardly over the finish line and think "thank god that's over"? I feel like that might be me the minute I finish the last "Tempest" adaptation on my list; my impression of the gym-resolvers is they build a habit that continues past the year (or they fail to stick with the resolution). I will likely not be continuing this project in a way that continues to generate wordcount here, although there are parts I've found very interesting and will likely continue to explore on my own — I think I'd like to track down a copy of the BBC's The Spread of the Eagle, The War of the Roses, and An Age of Kings; additionally, I've started listening to The History of England podcast which has so far been extremely illuminating in talking about how we got to the events covered in The Henriad. Again, not something I'll likely be writing/blogging on directly, although I'm presently ideating some possible outputs that'd lean on that knowledge.

This week we watched My Own Private Idaho, the Gus Van Sant movie starring River Phoenix and an extremely earnest Keanu Reeves. Idaho isn't really a Shakespeare adaptation; or, it is, in a weird way, but it uses the studium of 1&2 Henry IV to tell a story more in line with The Chimes at Midnight, where it's about the betrayal and dissolution of a friendship over class ascension. I think, looking at my spreadsheet, that this might be the true first of the Teen Shakespeare moment we had in the 90s; if not this, then maybe the little bit of A Midsummer Night's Dream we got in Dead Poets Society.

I found this movie very inventive with its imagery and moving with its story; I'm so used to the post-Matrix "cool" Keanu Reeves so seeing him so sober and sincere feels impressive, refreshing even. River Phoenix too, I'd only ever seen him in Stand By Me and Indiana Jones; this was a very unguarded, nuanced performance, what a shame. The degree of genuineness, a lack of facade on both main characters was not at all what I'd expect from a "90s queer movie" — I'd expect some sort of heightened element: camp, drag, something to create a distance between performer, character, and observer, which then lets middle America laugh and know they're "one of the good ones". The distance of "This caricature is what I am putting into the world for you to watch and react to" feels extremely absent, even in scenes that are doing a skit I recognize from what I've been watching for the past couple months.

A bitter thought but given how many friendships I've seen fade and how many people I know who take their cues from their life from movies, fail to perceive class: I wonder how many people saw themselves as Scott [Keanu] in this and broke off from a friend they perceived as "lower class" than them only to inherit and mismanage their dad's local used RV business into the ground. How's that Dostoyevsky quote go? "Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing"?

I don't know if I've seen movies that remind me that they're movies as much as this one did — you could probably teach editing, kuleshov effect, and juxtaposition with this quite easily, it certainly calls attention to what it's doing. Yet at the same time I never felt pandered to with this in a way I have with other movies that take time to be didactic about lingua cinema. This is a very approachable movie, although I do feel like having the background with Henry IV made some scenes parseable, which I'd have otherwise found baffling.

Ultimately, I found this to be a very tender and unexpected movie. I'd really recommend you watch it, if you haven't already. It will teach you very little about Shakespeare.

Next week we are back at it with the 1989 academy award winning, Kenneth Branagh starring-and-directed Henry V.

• November 22 - The Black Adder [series one] (1983)
• November 29 - The Goodbye Girl (1977) & Looking For Richard (1996)
• December: The Tempest, adaptations still TBD