My Own Private Idaho
My Own Private Idaho
My Own Private Idaho
“While editing the film... Van Sant deleted a seven-minute version of Falstaff’s mock-trial…
because, he said, the Henry IV scenes “were becoming like a movie within the movie,” yet
they remain exactly that. Surely baffling to anyone unfamiliar with its source, the
Shakespearean content could be removed to create a perfectly coherent, though not
especially engaging seventy-minute feature.”
Daniel Rosenthal, 100 Shakespeare Films.
Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho is far from universally like.
In spite of its status as a cult film, and frequent appearances in movie lists and
countdowns, it remains largely dismissed by some, though not all, literary critics as a
valid addition to the canon of Shakespearean adaptation. There are a few primary
reasons for this. For instance, Van Sant, the film’s writer and director, does not follow
the original plot of Henry IV. He reanimates its characters within a modern and
foreign setting; specifically in the American northwest states of Oregon and the
eponymous Idaho, with particular focus on the ‘street hustlers’ of Portland, good
looking teenage boys who work as male prostitutes and are often heavily involved in
drug culture. Not only this, Van Sant is very selective with the play, weaving it
together with an original story centring on Mike, a narcoleptic teenager all but
orphaned by his abusive and absent parents. The result is that few characters from the
original play survive into modern incarnations, and with limited correspondence to
their actions in the play itself. Nor does the director retain much of the original
dialogue, opting instead to rewrite the play in the language of its protagonists, and
introducing several scenes and conversations entirely new to the plot.
What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours
were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds
and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair
hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst
be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.
What do you care? Why, you wouldn’t even look at a clock unless
hours were lines of coke, dials looked like the signs of gay bars, or
time itself was a fair hustler in black leather. Isn’t that right, Bob?
My Own Private Idaho
My Own Private Idaho would be a poor choice for any audience member who
was seeking to understand Henry IV; its relationship with the source is hazy, and it
seems to struggle at times to include or exclude certain moments in fear, as Hamlet
said, of losing the name of action. When the film does succeed, however, it can act as
a highly successful reappraisal of the text. Henry IV is typical of the type of
Shakespeare play that Cartelli argued had been colonised by consensus, and if there’s
one thing that a film such as this does not to, it is to conform to that.
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