This Road Will Never End: An Elegy to Gus Van Sant’s ‘My Own Private Idaho’
As I write this, it’s 31 years to the day that River Phoenix died. October 31st, 1993. That makes it 31 years to the day that someone truly important to me died, and so it feels only fitting that I write this now – a memorial, if you like; a sort of elegy to a film that shaped me and the actor who made it everything it was. But to write such a thing, I need to go back a few years…
To this: the year is 2020. I’m 15. I’ve just moved back to my hometown after three years away, and everything’s changed. My friends have grown up and moved on, away from me. New groups have been formed, new identities found, and new ideas developed. I’m lost. More than that, I’m also lonely, and although all I want is to find someone who understands, such a thing has never seemed so impossible.
Until it isn’t, and he’s just right there. His name is Mike Waters and he’s the same as me, I think. He’s a character in Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, which follows the lives of two hustlers from Portland, Oregon as they travel across America (and even to Italy) getting high, causing trouble, and trying to find anything that might bring some meaning to their barren lives. Mike (played by River Phoenix) is soft-spoken, narcoleptic, possibly gay, and wants – as so many do – nothing greater than to belong somewhere, to be loved and to have this love accepted. Mike is also, as I wrote in my diary the third time I watched the film and the first time I felt I really knew it, one of the most immortal characters in the history of cinema.
What I was thinking when I wrote that, I couldn’t say for sure – but if I were to guess, it would have something to do with the fact that Mike Waters is, in a way that I’ve never known another character on film to match, so, so, deeply human. He seems he’ll live forever because he could be anyone, and could indeed even be everyone. It doesn’t take much to imagine he could be a real person, waking up on a lonely highway in the middle of nowhere and walking the streets of Portland, trying to find some way to make the miserable day even just a little bit brighter. He’s someone we can relate to, and at the end of the day, that might be one of the most important gifts a film can offer a person – connection. It’s hard to be lonely, it’s hard to belong, sometimes it’s hard to keep going and it’s hard to believe in anything much, but Mike Waters knew these things too, and life doesn’t feel quite so bad when you remember that.
Of course, I do My Own Private Idaho an injustice by focusing exclusively on Mike or even River. The performances throughout are exceptional, especially given that a significant proportion of the film’s cast were real street kids and hustlers with no acting experiences. Their characters are profound, charming, and vivid; earnest in ways so affecting that the film becomes difficult to watch at times, faced as one is by the brutal reality of life for these people. Similarly, as Mike’s best friend Scott, Keanu Reeves is magnetic, open and spirited but still capable of bringing viewers (at least, this one) near to tears at certain moments.
But then, that’s the wonder of Idaho – it’s not a good film on the strength of its script alone, or any certain performances, or because of its cinematography. Certainly, all of these are brilliant on their own, but it’s in the combination of these elements and more that the film becomes truly special.
And by special, I mean this – since the first time I watched the film, Idaho has felt almost sacred to me; it’s something I’m deeply grateful to have in my life. Although this sounds clichéd, I genuinely believe what I said earlier, that it was something I’d been searching for. I knew after watching it that Idaho was something that truly belonged in my life, and belonged with me. It gave me something meaningful when the world seemed unbearable, and someone I could connect with and hold onto when it felt like I was invisible. Just as desperately as Mike Waters had been looking for something to call home two decades earlier, I was doing the same; unlike Mike, I found it there on those dirty streets of Portland, because for me, it was him. Him – a hustler, a drug user, a troublemaker and layabout; god, he was a kid who just wanted to be loved.
I loved him, for what it’s worth – and still do, of course, along with thousands of others who’ve watched the film and seen something hopeful in Mike, something that understands them when no one else does. It’s a rare film, to my mind, that can mean that to even one person, let alone the many whose appreciation for it have made Idaho a cult classic – but then, My Own Private Idaho is nothing if not a rare film. It’s touching, resonant, visually stunning and absolutely heartbreaking. It moves me and matters to me in a way I’ve yet to experience with any other film. And although I’m loath to describe anything as beautiful because the word seems at its heart to mean very little, I find with Idaho that words fail me; I have no way to do it justice beyond saying, quite simply, that My Own Private Idaho is the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know who I’d be without it.
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