Product Description

River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star in director Gus Van Sant’s haunting tale of two young street hustlers: Mike Waters, a sensitive narcoleptic who dreams of the mother who abandoned him, and Scott Favor, wayward son of the mayor of Portland and the object of Mike’s desire. Navigating a volatile world of junkies, thieves, and johns, Mike takes Scott on a quest from the grungy streets to the open highways of the Pacific Northwest, in search of an elusive place called "home." Groundbreaking and visually dazzling, My Own Private Idaho is a stirring look at unrequited love and life at society’s margins.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20034 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2005-03-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Italian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 104 minutes

Amazon.com
Mapping the spaces between fortune and degeneracy, Shakespeare and street cant, Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and gay and straight, My Own Private Idaho is the 1991 masterpiece by director Gus Van Sant. River Phoenix gave the most generous and memory-searing performance of his tragically shortened career as Mike Waters, a narcoleptic street hustler in search of his mother. His best friend, Scott, played by Keanu Reeves, is a son of privilege who fosters plans of rejoining the moneyed world of his father after gallivanting with assorted urchins and ne'er-do-wells. The beautifully symmetrical story that emerges between the two is one of friendship, yearning for lost time, and sexual identity conveyed with a poet's eye for landscape. The camera lingers on abandoned houses in golden fields and time-lapse clouds, providing what T.S. Eliot called "the objective correlative"--external representations of interior emotional states. We're treated to striking iconic sequences like a barn falling from the sky and still-life scenes of carnal entanglement. The supporting cast is a rogues' gallery that includes Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Udo Kier, director William Richert, and a variety of "nonactors" pulled literally off the street to provide documentary veracity to a film that gleefully careens into riffs on Henry IV. It's beautiful.

What's also beautiful is the Criterion Collection's treatment of the film's DVD debut. The director-approved transfer successfully conveys the warmth of the film's palette of oranges and browns, and preserves the whimsical atmospherics of the yodeling country music soundtrack. Many members of the original crew contribute their fond memories to the documentary features, which include a conversation between Phoenix's sister Rain and producer Laurie Parker. There are also two lengthy audio-only conversations--one between Van Sant and Velvet Goldmine director Todd Haynes, and another between author J.T. Leroy and filmmaker Jonathan Caouette about their experiences on the street. The deleted scenes mostly suggest alternate endings that Van Sant wisely left on the cutting room floor. A superb example of a beloved film on DVD. --Ryan Boudinot

Stills from My Own Private Idaho (click for larger image)

The Cast	River Phoenix	Keanu Reeves
Keanu and River	Udo Kier	Gus Van Sant

From The New Yorker
The third feature by the independent filmmaker Gus Van Sant ("Mala Noche," "Drugstore Cowboy") is like an exploded version of the previous two, and it scatters meanings all over the landscape. It's a beautiful disaster, like a bomb test in the middle of nowhere. The movie is set primarily in Van Sant's familiar territory-the seedier parts of Portland, Oregon-and its main characters are a pair of young hustlers, Mike (River Phoenix) and Scott (Keanu Reeves), who sell their bodies on the street. Mike is a narcoleptic: every time he blacks out, he has lyrical dreams composed of imagery from his childhood. Scott, who is the son of Portland's mayor, is modelled on Shakespeare's Prince Hal; the Falstaff character here is a scruffy gay cokehead called Bob (William Richert), and his scenes with Scott are stylized variations of incidents from both parts of "Henry IV" (hence also variations on Orson Welles' "Chimes at Midnight"). Van Sant takes a lot of chances, and, visually, the movie is so imaginative, so fiercely alive, that it carries us along. But when the over-all design of the picture becomes clear, we feel cheated rather than enlightened. Scott turns into a villain; Bob is ennobled as a symbol of outlaw freedom; and Mike takes on the aura of a holy fool, the Prince Myshkin of the Portland meat market. Van Sant's vision is disappointingly trite and schematic. Phoenix, however, gives a superbly intelligent and intuitive performance. Although the script ends up begging for sympathy for Mike, the actor never does. He's genuinely touching: when the young hustler wakes from one of his dream visions, we feel as though we could see the afterimages lingering on his clouded face. Also with James Russo and Udo Kier. The original screenplay is by Van Sant. Eric Alan Edwards and John Campbell did the cinematography. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, Heartbreaking, Lonely, Eerie, Unforgettable
Most people seem shocked when I tell them that "My Own Private Idaho" is one of my favorite movies ever, though I don't see why. One of Gus Van Sant's lower budget films, this melancholic adaptation of Shakespeare's "Henry IV" to the American West (chiefly Portland, Oregon and all around the western states) follows the adventures of a road-tripping prodigal son of wealthy and powerful politician (played to perfection by a reflective Keanu Reeves)and his best friend, a narcoleptic prostitute (a visionary performance by the late River Phoenix).

"My Own Private Idaho" is a marvel: dreamlike, eerie, haunting, constantly engaging, often surreal. There are a handful of films I have seen that completely transport me out of the feeling I'm seeing a film: this is one of them. The film's first haunting image of River Phoenix, alone, on a desolate stretch of Western highway, taken by his sickness, has to be seen to be believed; the eerie "Riding the Prairie" is a perfect complement to this movie about two strangers in a very strange land, journeying among the hustlers, hookers, con-men, schemers and bon vivants in the modern American West.

The plot is loose and rangy, and like its subjects, Van Sant uses it as needed to move the story along: Phoenix's character wants a reconciliation with his estranged mother, and certainly peace with himself. Keanu, sensing debauchery and fun, tags along, and the movie rambles about with them, taking note of their adventures and their pursuers (particularly delightful and outre is their awkward and funny tryst with an older woman, spoiled by Phoenix's narcolepsy, and a splendidly funny turn by Udo Kier as Hans, an unbearably kinky German john who simply will not be left behind).

For all its strangeness, there is a rich, empathetic core at the heart of this movie. Interviews with the film's young, hip, pierced and tattooed street prostitutes are funny, free-form, almost documentary in style, and often surprisingly moving, but the film is not hackneyed or saccharine; Van Sant has too much respect for his characters to ever stray into preachiness or movie-of-the-week ("this week: battling child prositution!" tone is not to be found here) territory.

The cinematography of "My Own Private Idaho" is lush and alluring, and the story and travels of its young and naive (albeit experienced) protagonists are fresh and intriguing enough for Van Sant to have neglected the tie-in with Shakespeare. That said, the allusion to Keanu as a treacherous Prince Hal, ready to sell out his friends to take up his destiny, doesn't harm the movie, and even accentuates its tragic tone---not to mention that indie-director William Richert is amusing as a latter-day Falstaff.

"My Own Private Idaho" is certainly not for everyone, and to many will seem contrived and inaccessible. But for the discriminating viewer who welcomes the opportunity to have River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves serve as tour guides into a strange and unsettling landscape, it will very likely prove unforgettable.

Wishlust wanderings; or, Snapshots of the Damned
When *My Own Private Idaho* hit the rental shelves of the local movie theater way back in the early 90's, its reputation spread immediately among the young and restless of my small, conservative home-town. The consensus was of near-unanimous disgust, with common descriptions including "sick," "depraved," and that age-old chestnut "Confusing" with a capital "C." And yet my opinion was, typically, not that of the consensus. My artist's spirit identified with the wanderlust-yearning and puckish wonder inhabited in the vagabond Scott and Mike - a somewhat-sheltered mind's naïve lust for that opposite of its own experience. Although I certainly found myself shocked by the depiction of homosexual prostitution, the romantic tone and Shakespearan prose-play helped to penetrate (so to speak) this gutterpunk-fantasy firmly into the deepest reaches of my life-thirsty cerebrum; if anything, I found the homophobic snarls of my teenage compatriots in regards to this film more disturbing - on an immediate, reactionary level - than any fantastical degradation the film itself presented.

Immersed in that heady sensation of nostalgia and curiosity, I looked forward to a mature re-viewing of this art house masterpiece: of filtering Van Zant's intentions through an adult lens. Accordingly, I found that which impressed me most as a child seemed less important to my current mindset, and vice versa - no longer was I wholly enraptured by the wide-shots of empty highways and the plethora of bizarre chance encounters (elements so common to life on the road): having Kerouac'ed my way across the world, I must admit to preferring my own experiences to *Idaho's* hodge-podge questing. Consequently, the depiction of street-life squalor, early 90's-era Portland style, resonated far deeper this time around: a bell-toll for the doomed.

River Phoenix shines in perhaps his defining role as Mike, a homeless narcoleptic endlessly conking out in moments of stress, shivering and twitching in ecstatic remembrance of mommy dearest and sharecropper-esque glory (decrepit farmhouses and dust-bowl potato-sprawl): several scenes, including his breakdown at the fire and romper-stomp at the funeral, shine with a quicksilver talent so brilliant that it easily transcends the drug-addled ghost Phoenix was already beginning to become. As for Keanu Reeves... well, I've always been of the opinion that he is the most underrated of H-wood's golden A-list, a man with deep presence and charisma, hampered by a stoic demeanor and tonal limitations. I must admit I found it rather disconcerting to see Neo preening on the cover of a porno-rag: still, Reeve's subtle reactions to Fat Bob and Mike's outspoken coat-tail riding; his recitation of Shakespeare, Henry V style, with a cowboy twang thrown in at the pivotal tension-trigger; and finally his ascension from rebellious naïf to "master of the universe"-Reeves gives an outstanding performance, among his very best (though this may come across as an oxymoron to some - so be it).

Moreover, the very tools that romanticize *Idaho's* ne'er-do-well protagonists -- Celtic rhythms, lurid colors, Ye Olde English capering - also flip-side emphasize the constant-trauma and grimy exploitation of the LCD rent-boy's raw existence, with suffering only alleviated via spurts of snorting, drinking, mischief and, perchance, a miraculous stranger's unexpected generosity. As Fat Bob and Mike's illusions of wealth-an eternal party utterly devoid of street-life cost-unravel, the subsequent denouement is immeasurably augmented by the early 'warmth' of the film, and the steady chill that seeps through the cracks, numbing body and mind, overwhelm its progression until abrupt collapse upon the desolate highway of the ending.

A few noteworthy scenes: When Fat Bob coldly warns Mike about "Living on yer [arse]," the horrific undercurrent ramifications cut the usual tongue-wag riffing like a knife. Likewise, near the movie's conclusion, when Mike slumps into his ump-teenth narcoleptic fit on a filthy concrete street, the camera pans to Scott newly-settled in his seat of mobile power, enforcing the inevitable destiny of these lost souls, harlots high and low: one elevated to the highest reaches of society, the other forever abandoned to the cold stone and cold hands of the Outskirts.

*My Own Private Idaho:* a paean for the lost and lonely, the gutterpunk romantic in us all. Five stars.

Reality check...
This movie shocked me at first, but I soon realized that Gus Van Sant and the actors, especially Phoenix strove to present us with a picture and a reality we often don't see or don't choose to see. Welcome to the world of male hustlers. I didn't expect to be taken on a date in the first few minutes, and I was sad to learn how a person can give over their body for a 20$ bill. I was impressed and touched by River Phoenix's preparation for this character. His effort paid off beautifully! I understand through reading some of the biographical books about him; he always threw himself into every character. It is said that in preparation of the film, he spent a great deal of time with one particular hustler, a young man, whom he portrays. In addition, he lost an incredible amount of weight to look the part. Mike Waters is a young man looking for something. From highways to gay bars and back again, he searches for his mother, an ethereal character from his dreams, nightmares, and semi-wakefulness from his bouts of narcolepsy. The fits of instant sleep provided some comical moments, yet I enjoyed it because I was finding out what gave Mike stress. He was also looking for love from a man, and not from turning tricks. The actors often reffered to having sex with another person, for free, which gave you wings. The extent to which Mike and other actors will go to search and strive after a goal is unbelievable: From the high plains to the sea-board cities to France, they wandered from place to place looking for Mike's Mom. There is a conflict between Mike and his older brother, who is more a part of Mike life than he realizes. I was inspired by the courage of the characters to show the depth of comittment that a young man will go through to discover truth, no matter how difficult.

I highly recommend this movie to become aware of what happens all around us. We can love others better when remove the labels and love them regardless of where they came from. As a pastor and reviewer, I benefited greatly to seeing a brand new perspective of life and it helped in my work to aid people I know in these situations. It made me wonder - in this season of Christmas why our homes are not open to rejected teens. Loving and intimate relationships are free to give. Mike and his companion had a intense relationship of companionship which didn't revolve around sex That should inspire us to think how we treat the people around us.