My Own Private Idaho New Beverly Cinema 7165 W. Beverly Blvd. Wednesday, Sept.
26, 9:10 p.m. Gus Van Sant could easily be considered a narcoleptic filmmaker.
His work often seems to lull the viewer into cinematic sleep: The long tracking shots pull one under its ocean of subtle readings; the monochromatic color schemes present a world that is stable, secure, ordered. Suddenly, though, the films jolt awake - they bolt upright as the world falls apart, as the center ceases to hold. In 'Elephant,' for instance, the deadness of a small town's tones of beige and gray erupts into bloody mayhem.
The long shots that once fostered balance become painful, teetering on the edge of the perverse. "My Own Private Idaho," based in part on Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, is, fittingly, about a narcoleptic drowsing and jolting through life (River Phoenix, in the role that most defined his too-short career and life) and his friend, a prep-school boy (Keanu Reeves) looking distinctly out of place. At times the film is a jumble of tones and styles, at once Shakespearean - in its broad vistas of empty sky and empty lives - and stridently contemporary - the dress code is roadie/hipster '80s, which is to say, the kind of thing you'd see on campus any day of the week.
Van Sant is in some ways a fastidious director, revelling in composition and its dismantling. But "Idaho" is all dismantling and no composition, which may be its finest attribute.
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