Director: Gus Van Sant
Year Released: 1991
Rating: 2.5
Two young hustlers (Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, oddly perfect together) roam around Portland, Oregon - Reeves out of open defiance of his mayor father (and to look for love), Phoenix in search of his birth mother (and to also look for love). I despised this when I first saw it a full decade ago, and can fully see what bothered me so: it's episodic, fearlessly pretentious and a little lazy, and though this second viewing hasn't made me a complete convert (it is still all of those things, and then some), it's easily one of the most distinctive and ambitious American films of the last twenty years, a patchwork of fragments that emulates Phoenix's on-screen narcolepsy, drifting from the physical to the ethereal. The scenes cribbed from The Bard's Henry IV take some getting used to (or should be willfully ignored), as encouraging Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to overact and forcing Reeves to recite verse are simply not good ideas. Phoenix is phenomenal, however: he's genuinely spooked and preoccupied with his own loneliness (like Dean, he would have aged wonderfully). Appropriately, the emotion generated from this resides in one's memory of the picture instead of from the immediacy of the viewing - either the pieces cling to you or they drift into the never.
