It’s been 20 years and we still can’t quit Ang Lee’s sweeping cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain, this heart-wrenching tale of forbidden love in the Montana outback. But tucked away in the history of queer cinema, Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix drove across America in Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho so that, 14 years later, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal could leap into history-making double Oscar nominations for their portrayals of two closeted ranchers’ decades-long affair.
As one of the seminal entries in the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, van Sant’s gritty Idaho plunks us in the middle of Mike Waters (Phoenix) and Scott Favor’s (Reeves) story as two unhoused sex workers in Portland. Filmed in a documentary style with the Shakespeare-inspired dialogue that foreshadowed the ’90s obsession with all things Bardian, van Sant’s young leads are raw and fearless.
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Fresh off River Phoenix’s first and only Oscar nomination for Running on Empty in 1988 — one of the youngest actors ever nominated — up-and-comer Phoenix stunned the world with his nuanced portrayal of lovelorn narcoleptic Mike, whose tragedies shape the arc and eventual betrayals of My Own Private Idaho. Equally shocking was Keanu Reeves, newly of Ted “Theodore” Logan fame appearing in this often brutal indie drama as the calculating and borderline sociopathic Scott Favor, who is poverty cosplaying to upset his mayor father, while giving his unhoused comrades the impression he’ll lift them out of destitution when he returns to the manor born.
Certainly a huge part of the Idaho surprise for audiences and critics alike was the openly gay context of Phoenix and Reeves as unapologetic sex workers — the film even opens with Mike on the receiving end of a blow job — which provoked an immediate backlash of homophobic ire that resulted in the film being outright ignored by awards bodies that today would have lauded both Phoenix and Reeves for their work.
Where Brokeback Mountain in 2005 received dozens of nominations by virtually every film awards body around the world, in 1991 My Own Private Idaho saw only four: the International Critics Award at the Toronto Film Festival, The New York Film Critics Circle awards, Independent Spirit Award, and Phoenix won the Volpi Cup for best actor at the Venice Film Festival. Keanu Reeves’ equally astounding performance received nary a mention.
In fact, it would be just two years after Idaho’s release in 1993 that Tom Hanks would win an Oscar for his turn as a gay man dying of HIV/AIDS in Philadelphia’s highly whitewashed portrayal of queer love on screen — an honor that should have gone to both Phoenix and Reeves first for their work in van Sant’s now-iconic film.
While Brokeback Mountain explores a timeless personal struggle of same sex love in a rural context through Ennis (Ledger) and Jack Twist’s (Gyllenhaal) decades-long affair, in contrast My Own Private Idaho has become something of a time capsule as Van Sant’s film captures the understated horror of the sex work experience for young men in a post-AIDS era that was yet to consider gay lives mattering. Van Sant’s use of Shakespearean interludes and fourth-wall breaks become a counterpoint to the tragedy of these young men’s lives as desperation and poverty force them into a line of work they haven’t exactly consented to — aside from Reeves’ Scott Favor who is the only one with family money and a comfortable back-up plan.
Despite the odes to Henry V that bring the Brechtian in reminding us we are indeed spectators to someone else’s story, van Sant’s documentary style humanizes the young sex workers within the context of a wholly unglamourous reality, in particular when the youngsters monologue about their first experiences selling sex and the often nonconsensual, violent turns these encounters took as the boys laugh through their trauma.
It’s rare that a film can be both a time capsule of a specific cultural moment as well as timeless, and it’s in Mike Waters’ fireside confession of love to Scott, where Phoenix’s extraordinary performance goes the entire distance, that My Own Private Idaho reveals itself to be one of the most heartbreaking unrequited love stories ever put to screen. We have none of Brokeback Mountain’s hopefulness, brief as it may be, that the star-crossed lovers will have their moments together, far away from prying eyes where they can simply exist in their own truths. Not only are the young hustlers of Idaho forced to contend with the harsh realities of being gay in a world that rejects them, but they are often forced into impossible choices that often have grave consequences for their health.
When the Criterion Collection added Idaho to their archive, it wrote, “Van Sant’s use of Shakespeare turns the marginality of the world he depicts on its head. The director presents the social rituals of the squatters with the intricacy of the history play; Shakespeare’s language and the anachronisms of those scenes (for instance, the monk outfits the group wears to pull off a robbery) play as the codes of their subculture.” And it’s in this liminal space where van Sant, Phoenix, Reeves, and company paved the way for the mainstreaming of queer cinema and gay representation on screen, a territory where years later Brokeback Mountain’s own love story could be made with all the pomp and visual polish of an award season contender that just happens to have gay men at its center instead of the usual heteronormative love affairs.
As we celebrate the 20th birthday of Brokeback Mountain this year, a tender film about two complicated men who fell in love in a world that would rather see them dead than out and happy, we need to include My Own Private Idaho in the discussion as a cultural foundation for this kind of queer cinema. Because it wasn’t until 2024, 33 years after its release, that My Own Private Idaho was finally added to the National Film Registry for its social and cultural significance.
At the end of Idaho, Phoenix’s Mike says about the highway he’s been abandoned on: “This road will never end, it probably goes all around the world.” My Own Private Idaho is the road, and the path of queer cinema van Sant’s masterpiece has paved has indeed gone around the world, even if it’s still taking history time to catch up with it.
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