Best Keanu: (none). [embracing River Phoenix]

As a kid I used to make collages out of magazine photos, back when magazines were easy to buy and had lots of glossy photos (who buys magazines these days?). I used to clip out images and use a glue stick to adhere them to poster board and tack them up on my wall. I tended towards muted toned images, often of people, rarely with bright colors or sharp edges.

Were my collages art? No, I don’t think so. I didn’t take the photos or guide the models, or even spot the scenery or conceive of the image. I took what was already there and rearranged it. That’s much like what James Franco did with My Own Private River, where he took outtakes from My Own Private Idaho and rearranged them into a feature-length visual experience.

Is this a “film” in the traditional sense? I guess so. As much as my wall collages were art photographs. Either could be called “art” in one sense: by rearranging the images, Franco and my teenage self both altered the message, meaning, and narrative of the original product. It is a new piece of art, then, but does it follow the legacy of the original, expanding upon it, or does it bastardize its original intention?

There is a difference between a teenager chopping up pics from her issues of Rolling Stone to put on her bedroom wall and a noted actor somehow convincing Idaho‘s original visionary, Gus Van Sant, to not only show him the unused footage, but to somehow get the go-ahead to piece it together in this digital format where Franco tells a different story. It’s unclear who he had to ask to do this, ethically or legally, but it’s done, and remains unreleased, as far as I can tell, except for circulating versions online.

It feels inappropriate to focus so much on River in this Idaho retelling, although that’s the (under)stated purpose. It’s all in the title. But by so doing Franco presents us with a film that almost entirely eliminates one major theme of Idaho, class, while muddying another: sexuality. It feels like Franco used Van Sant’s pieces to tell a very different story than Van Sant intended, even if he did source some of Van Sant’s early scripts.

The fact that the scenes were even shot, by Van Sant himself, perhaps says that what we now view as the story of Idaho is only one version that Van Sant might have intended. But nonetheless, River feels messy and weird.

There are some benefits to My Own Private River. The film starts with raw footage of the group of hustlers on the street (River shows us there were other characters conceived of in Idaho that didn’t seem to make it into the final film). Among them are River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, who are indistinguishable from the others. It’s striking to have the realization that, if you didn’t know who River and Keanu were, you would not even question that they were street hustlers; there’s no hint either is acting. In an age where we talk so much about the digital image, and the challenges of distinguishing fantasy from reality, it’s almost unsettling to watch, knowing that it is a scene from a movie that ended up on the cutting room floor. It is not real.

River also completely eliminates the Shakespeare element, leaving Bob to appear in only one scene, where Mike and Scott steal his cocaine. This makes it an easier watch but also makes Mike (as the focus is on Mike and not Scott) seem far more alone and dependent on Scott than he was in Idaho. The other characters, specifically the two hustlers who appear in Idaho and get a cameo in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues two years later, get a kind of resolution in River as Mike chats with both at their respective jobs at fast food joints.

Mike also has sex with a woman, a friend, not for cash, which kind of muddies the queer theme; it’s fine in a real life way, that love and sex have a place regardless of gender, but in the movie also entirely undercuts the campfire scene where Scott draws a bright line between what he does for money and what he does for love. In Idaho, those bright lines exist, which is why the film is so powerful and moving; Mike loves Scott and chooses to tell him this; Scott says two guys can’t love each other. Messing around with even the perception of Mike’s sexuality in River gets rid of Idaho‘s central tension, making it just a meaningless art film filled with disjointed images.

The original campfire scene doesn’t appear in River, but the extremely moving extended campfire hug scene, which Van Sant left out of the original cut, does. In my post on Idaho I think I explain why this extended campfire hug scene is so important. If you want to give James Franco kudos for anything on this project, it is for letting us see those images, if only against the backdrop of the original Idaho.

I didn’t watch either film closely enough to know for sure, but I feel like River‘s choice of certain takes of scenes that did end up in Idaho struck a slightly different tone. I felt like Mike and Scott touched each other more in River, showing more physical affection. Which would have fit better with Idaho, if it had been placed there originally and not in this collection of moving pictures that examines River Phoenix.

You do finish River with a stronger sense of Phoenix as a talented performer and actor, and perhaps that is the sum total of Franco’s intent. If so, he succeeded I think.

Last benefit of this film: in one scene in Rome, on the farm, there are sheepskins lined up on clotheslines (or something similar). Watching that made the story that Keanu Reeves tells about River Phoenix in the clip below make sense. I’d heard him tell the story before, but got the impression the two were somewhere seeing sheep slaughtered, a weird outing for Phoenix, from a family of known vegans. But now the story makes sense.

For that clarification, and the hug scene, thanks James Franco, I guess.

[September 2023]