My Own Private Idaho
June 2005 Reviewed by: Marc Mickelson Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Love stories don't come in a much more unconventional form than My Own Private Idaho. Neither do road movies.

Set mostly in Portland, My Own Private Idaho stars River Phoenix as Mike Waters, a narcoleptic male prostitute who is in love with Scott Favor, played by Keanu Reeves. Scott, however, craves romantic love with a woman and feels brotherly love for Mike. He also projects love for his rich, successful father onto Bob Pigeon (William Richert), the boisterous leader of a group of young homeless thieves and hustlers. The movie has obvious Shakespearean overtones, with Bob playing Falstaff to Scott's Prince Hal. Through all of this, Mike searches for pieces of his past, especially his long-lost mother, so that he can understand his present and hopefully his future. His sleeping attacks certainly don't aid him.

Director Gus Van Sant has infused My Own Private Idaho with equal amounts of gritty realism and poetic beauty. Street life is tough, but it has a nobility under Van Sant's direction, with well-wrought sets and landscapes that glow with near-infinite beauty. All of this may scream "art film," but My Own Private Idaho is thoroughly rooted in its characters. The affection between Mike and Scott is reminiscent of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. The gorgeous cinematography brings to mind Days of Heaven. My Own Private Idaho is right at home in such important company.

Criterion has done a masterful job with the video transfer, which is the best I've seen from DVD so far. Colors are brilliantly saturated and true, and the look has an undeniable film-like quality. Like so many Criterion releases, My Own Private Idaho is a two-disc set, the second filled with supplementary materials, including deleted scenes, video interviews, and an insightful making-of documentary created specifically for this release. All of the things that make Criterion Collection DVDs the most significant you can buy are at work here: an important film, a stunning transfer, meaningful extras, and attention to detail.

So many marginal movies have made it to DVD before My Own Private Idaho -- it was in theaters in 1991, but this is its initial DVD release. I hope this signals that a similarly posh new edition of Drugstore Cowboy, the Gus Van Sant movie that immediately precedes My Own Private Idaho, is in the works.

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