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My Own Private Idaho Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 41 Reviews)

Have A Nice Day
An interesting film that looks at the lives of two street kids and their travels to find a true home and adoration. The cast is wonderful with River Phoenix (Mike) giving a heartbreaking performance as a nomad in search of his mother, and the deep longing for love and acceptance from a slumming rich kid, Scott (Keanu Reeves). The direction is mellow and passive in rich oranges and pastels with shots framed on the subject matter in bare form. The film never bows down to a perfect ending nor does it make victims or violators of the characters. It was a breakthrough art film that has aged well and avoided stereotypes immersing itself in the human characteristics everyone shares.

Captures the Bonds and Betrayals of Youth
Influenced by European observational filmmakers like Antonioni and Bela Tarr and the elastic conventions of the American 'road movie,' Gus Van Sant represented the cinematic side of the artistic zeitgeist sweeping the Pacific Northwest in the early nineties. While later films like 'Even Cowgirls...' and 'Gerry' caught aspects of his typically offbeat humor and poetic style, 'Idaho' is his peak, with the late River Phoenix rising to the challenge of the role of Mike the narcoleptic hustler with a remarkably intuitive and vulnerable performance. Keanu Reeves has less of the burden as his fellow hustler and best friend Scott, but his silences communicate each step in the gradual breakdown of their friendship quite eloquently. A movie to watch when you think of the friends you couldn't wait to see after summer breaks, and how it all eventually evaporated.

Debauchery Made Boring
Neither fabulous performances by the late River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, as well as creatively framed cinematography - including the live-talk of the porn mag stars - could save this impossibly flawed Van Sant movie of rebels without a cause. I literally snored through moments of the the movie, and wasn't even intrigued, as a viewer must be, by the grueling sadism of the minor characters, let alone the journey of the main characters. What journey? A journey straight to hell. The best parts of the film are its title and the shots of the long roads of desolate Idaho, echoing the desolation of the characters; and of teaming Portland, Oregon, just another busy industrial city with its dens of iniquity and ridiculous gratuitous violence.

I enjoyed seeing actor Phoenix's depictions of the brain disorder narcolepsy, dropping dead asleep in his tracks, a metaphor for the lost dead soul of Phoenix. If only Gus Van Sant could have made debauchery intriguing, instead of tormenting, and left the viewer to contemplate, "Why on earth?" Instead, My Own Private Idaho was merely tiresome, and waiting for the viewer to cry, "Enough already!" And turn off the 1993 video

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