HANS: My name is Hans. I'm from Germany. And now I live in America.
So writes director Gus Van Sant in his second feature-film, My Own Private Idaho, after the attention-getting Drugstore Cowboy (1989) made him palpable to audiences too puritan for Larry Clark and too impatient with another William S. Burroughs devotee, David Cronenberg. The controlled chaos that is Idaho is testament to a director who allows his actors a physicality not often encouraged by book-minded, words-first directors, from the halting explosiveness of Idaho's Keanu Reeves (below, left) to the ludic tics of his co-star River Phoenix (above, left).
I had not seen My Own Private Idaho since its first theatrical release, and after seeing it yesterday I realized I had never seen it with honest eyes, distracted as I was by my attempt to track its borrowings from the opening acts of Shakespeare's Henry IV.
Uno Kier appears in three of Idaho's scenes, and that's the right amount of time for this viewer. Not that I'm impatient with him -- I love Udo Kier, especially his performance as Little Brother (Riget) in Lars Von Trier's Kingdom (1994). I guess what I'm saying is I prefer him in small doses, like a mid-paragraph semi-icolon. My introduction to Kier came in high school, when a group of us attended a midnight screening of Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1974) -- on mushrooms.
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