River Phoenix Is Not Just The Boy Next Door By Karen Schoemer.
In “My Own Private Idaho,” River Phoenix plays the boy next door, except that next door is a ghetto where street youths sleep on the sidewalk. As Mike Waters, a narcoleptic teen-age hustler, Mr. Phoenix’s closest approximation to home is a ransacked, burned-out hotel; his surrogate family is a rickety support system of street friends. His knowledge of his real home consists of dim memories of his mother, a house whose color he can’t remember, and a brother who lives somewhere in Idaho.
In the film, which was shown at the New York Film Festival and opens today in New York and nationally Oct. 18, Mr. Phoenix wears no makeup, and there’s a even pimple or two on his cheek. His clothes are seedy, and his dirty-brown hair continually disheveled. In other words, he strips Mike of none of his grime in a performance that earned him the best-actor prize at this month’s Venice Film Festival.
“He’s put his lips as close to any street-gutter ooze as you can,” Mr. Phoenix says of his character. “His cut-open flesh is as close to a stone brick wall as anything. He’s part of the street. He’s like a rat.”
Mr. Phoenix’s performance as Mike, along with his role as an aggressive marine in the current film “Dogfight,” represents a marked departure for an actor who has epitomized the more conventional version of the boy next door.
In the 1986 film “Stand by Me” he was a tough but tender small-town teen-ager who goes on an adventure with three pals; in “The Mosquito Coast” (1986) he played the earnest son of an idealistic inventor. His portrayal of a brainy, sensitive piano student breaking free of his family in the 1989 film “Running on Empty” won him an Academy Award nomination. Even playing the young Indiana Jones in a big-budget action film like “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” that same year, Mr. Phoenix had the chance to grapple with the differences between right and wrong.
Roles like these have made the 21-year-old Mr. Phoenix one of the most respected and popular young actors in Hollywood. The list of directors he has worked with includes Sidney Lumet, Peter Weir, Rob Reiner, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan; among his co-stars have been William Hurt, Harrison Ford, Christine Lahti, Kevin Kline and Sidney Poitier.
“River is the archetype of the young male lead,” says Gus Van Sant, the director of “My Own Private Idaho.” “He had a slot that he was in, and that he’s actually growing out of. But at the time in Hollywood, everyone with a project that had an 18-year-old blond-haired, blue-eyed kid would always say, ‘We’re thinking of River Phoenix in this part.’ ”
In another sense, “My Own Private Idaho” is simply an extreme, desanitized version of themes that have cropped up repeatedly in Mr. Phoenix’s films. “Running on Empty,” “The Mosquito Coast,” “Little Nikita” and even “Stand by Me” addressed the meaning of family relationships and, in particular, the attempt to create a normal family situation under abnormal circumstances. These problems are the primary motivation for Mike Waters, who eventually embarks upon a twisted, circular journey in search of his mother.
Sitting in a Japanese restaurant in the SoHo section of Manhattan recently, Mr. Phoenix at first dismisses these connections. “I don’t ever think of a project in reference to what I’ve done in the past,” he says. “It’s isolated for me. I can’t think of it like that, because it becomes more of a format strategy. Any script is its own little time frame.”
He stops short, momentarily diverted by a conversation between a man and a woman at the table next to him. “ They’re talking about family,” he adds, looking at the man. “He’s talking about how this woman should leave the family and not be supported by her family, and get a job and not be like her older sister who’s always coming back to the house for refuge. It’s just a universal thing.”
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
titsay
yousharknotpass
