LIKE THE other directors in this book, Gus Van Sant is a multitalented artist, working as a filmmaker, producer, photographer, musician, actor, and even author. He wrote some of the screenplays for his earlier movies; collaborated with other scripters on other films; published one novel, Pink, and a book of photography, 108 Portraits; and filmed over a dozen shorts and music videos.
Van Sant has been one of the undisputed leaders of the new American independent cinema. An iconoclastic filmmaker, he has provided a fresh and distinctive voice over the past three decades. Unlike Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh, and other American directors of his generation, Van Sant employs a style that’s too devious, a vision that’s too personal to be easily imitated. His expressive imagery is defined by odd rhythms and jagged camera angles. Coming to filmmaking by way of painting, he is more concerned than other directors with the ability of visual images and evocative silences to tell stories poignantly, without reliance on language or dialogue. He favors images that are shot from odd angles: the grille of a car with clouds looming overhead, the edge of a pack of gum, the printing on the top of a lightbulb, the full ashtray and cigarette smoke. These idiosyncratic shots yield powerful moments that deliberately disrupt the flow of his narratives, preventing them from being too smooth or too easy to digest.
Since the 1980s, Van Sant has reaffirmed his status as American cinema’s most dedicated chronicler of youth—working-class youth, disaffected middle-class youth, regional youth, dispossessed black youth. His stories are often set in Portland, where he has lived and worked for most of his life. His explorations of society’s skid row have yielded such potent films as Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and My Own Private Idaho. Disconnected teenagers and alienated youngsters have occupied the center of his mainstream films, such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, as well as his independent ones, like Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, Paranoid Park, and Restless.
Van Sant was nominated for the Best Director Oscar twice—in 1997 for Good Will Hunting and in 2008 for the biopicture Milk. The leading actors of both movies, Matt Damon and Sean Penn, respectively, were also nominated for Best Actor Oscars, and Penn won for Milk. Beginning with To Die For in 1995, most of Van Sant’s features have premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, where he has won the Palme d’Or in 2002 for Elephant and a special award in 2007 at the festival’s sixtieth anniversary.
In his films, Van Sant has dealt with marginalized subcultures, including homosexuals; however, his concern lies more with working-class youths, disregarding their particular sexual orientation or at least not dwelling on it as the crucial defining attribute of their identities and lifestyles. A running motif in his work is the painful formation of identities of lower-class adolescents. Nonetheless, unlike the sexually charged tales of Pedro Almodóvar, there is no graphic depiction of sex (homosexual or heterosexual) in his films and few overtly erotic scenes—for reasons that I will later try to explain.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER BEGINNING
Van Sant was born July 24, 1952, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Betty (née Seay) and Gus Green Van Sant Sr., a clothing manufacturer and traveling salesman who worked his way up the corporate ladder to become a top executive of several companies. His father’s job caused the family to move frequently during his childhood. In 1962, the family settled in Darien, Connecticut, about forty miles northeast of New York City. The director later referred to his family as “corporate gypsies” because they were continually relocating during his boyhood. With his father frequently away from home, he was forced to mature and become self-reliant at an earlier age than his cohorts. More significantly, the lack of roots in one place may explain his attraction to outsiders—particularly migrant and uneducated youngsters from Mexico, seeking a better life in America.
“I had a family that moved around a lot, and I was always amassing a new group of friends. Each city had its own group of friends,”1 Van Sant later recalled. The necessity of making new friends might have resulted in the specific themes in his work—the dispossessed family, the search for home, the embrace of new surrogate families. “For whatever reason, if it’s just by chance, I’m always drawn to these stories.” The constant moving did not suggest diversity, however, because all of the towns were “very suburban and very similar places.” This made it easy for him to adapt to different locales but “not necessarily to blend.”2 Like John Waters and Almodóvar, early on, Van Sant realized that he was “the strange, quirky, and infamous member of the family.”3
Like Todd Haynes, Van Sant has acknowledged the effect of particular teachers on his artistic sensibility at a crucial period in his life—when he was an adolescent. As he recalled: “I had some influential teachers in school, one was a great art teacher. There was a whole group of students who religiously took his art class. We all had to take the class, but a bunch of us worked after school because we were entertained by him and he encouraged us. He was my inspiration in the early days.”4 That the teacher was sophisticated and well versed in the new aesthetics of Andy Warhol and company was expected, but the fact that he was openly gay was unusual in the context of 1963 Connecticut. Then there was a bright writing instructor who exposed Van Sant and his cohorts to new books and showed his class Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a movie whose powerful imagery and innovative techniques had an immense impact on the impressionable teenager. In this respect, his formative years and the strong influence of particular teachers recall Todd Haynes’s adolescence and stand in sharp contrast to that of Almodóvar, who is an autodidact as far as film history and technical skills are concerned.
Inspired by his teachers, Van Sant took regular trips to New York City, visiting the Museum of Modern Art and other art forums, through which he familiarized himself with the work of Warhol and other iconoclastic artists. At sixteen, he got a summer job in the mailroom of McGregor-Doniger in Manhattan, which enabled him to buy books, such as Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction to the American Underground Film, and, more importantly, to buy a Super 8 movie camera, with which he would make several shorts in school. It was around this time that he was exposed to the experimental films of Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Conner, the Kuchar brothers, Jonas Mekas, Ron Rice, and Stan van der Beek, the same figures (more or less) that inspired Waters.
In 1970, Van Sant was accepted by the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At first, he was interested in painting, but after a few classes, he changed his mind, revealing his pragmatic side. Years later he told actor River Phoenix: “I changed from painting after my first year, because I thought that maybe a career in the film business was a more moneyed career. It was a safety bail-out. But, also, films were more complicated, and I’d pretty much mastered—at least in my estimation—painting. Filmmaking was a big mystery, and I thought to get anywhere in the business, I’d have to work really hard and forget about painting for a while.”5
Van Sant’s classmates at RISD included David Byrne and other members of the post-punk band Talking Heads. While at the school, he was introduced to some avant-garde directors, such as Stan Brakhage, Mekas, and Warhol. (The last had also inspired Almodóvar, albeit in different ways than Waters and Van Sant.) These encounters with the edgier, more offbeat figures of American cinema further encouraged Van Sant to change his major from painting to cinema. The aforementioned directors had long-lasting effects on him at an impressionable age.
After spending some time in Europe, Van Sant moved to Los Angeles in 1976, where he worked as a production assistant to writer-director Ken Shapiro. As noted, Van Sant has lived and worked in Portland for most of his life. Just as Waters has a deep connection to Baltimore, he feels a personal and professional affinity with the Pacific Northwest; as he explained: “I like shooting here, because it’s where I live and it’s accessible.”6 Tame and friendly, Portland, the City of Roses, is almost the opposite of Los Angeles: “People here tend to be more eccentric than people elsewhere. This place is full of folks who disdain the things that you might go to L.A. for, like a big house, a lot of money, ego.”7
In 1977, Van Sant made a short, The Discipline of D.E., based on an essay by his hero William S. Burroughs Jr., in which the filmmaker tried to explain the art of DE, or “Doing Easy.” The short was shown at the 1978 New York Film Festival to great acclaim, indicating to the young director how important festival showings are. An unsettling sensibility has prevailed in his work since The Discipline of D.E. and another twenty-minute short, The Happy Organ. Produced in collaboration with a high school classmate, the latter concerns two siblings who go on a weekend trip that ends tragically. (A similar story is told in his 2001 film, Gerry.)
While on the East Coast, Van Sant got a job at the Cadwell Davis ad agency in Manhattan as an assistant production manager, making the estimable salary of over $40,000 a year. Like all the other directors in this book, he experimented with 16mm shorts before daring to make a full-length feature. One of those was a personal short documentary, sort of a “coming out” on screen, titled My New Friend and lasting all of three minutes, which he narrated in a deadpan style: “I’m falling in love with a guy. So that’s frightening, isn’t it? It’s frightening to me?” Other shorts included a three-minute tribute to his paternal grandmother, Dorothy Green Van Sant, titled Where’d She Go? and a longer short (seven minutes) about an anonymous caller, which he named Nightmare Typhoon (aka Hello, It’s Me).
Van Sant first attempted a feature in 1980 with Alice in Hollywood, a troubled film that suffered from protracted production and editing processes. The film went through various versions, though none satisfying to the director or to the few viewers and critics who saw it. Based on firsthand observations of life around Hollywood Boulevard when he lived there in the late 1970s, his dark, ironic version of Alice in Wonderland centers on a naïve actress who goes to Hollywood to become a star, but in the end, she is forced to abandon her dreams and winds up as a street urchin. Though never released theatrically, Alice in Hollywood proved to be an extremely useful learning experience for the fledgling director. During that period, he began observing the down-and-out parts of Hollywood Boulevard (way before it was renovated and Disneyfied). Through these “trips,” Van Sant, a white, upper-middle-class man, became aware of the beauty and distinction of marginal subcultures, which stood in sharp contrast to the more prosperous worlds that surrounded them, the Hollywood Hills and Beverly Hills.
Though he had never concealed his sexual orientation, Van Sant described himself as “openly gay” only in the early 1990s. He was exposed to gay life in Manhattan (the West Village) in his late teens and early twenties, but by his own account, he was a late bloomer, coming out at age thirty: “I wasn’t really out in the 1970s, I was locked in my film world, I was writing scripts.”8 Even so, he was aware that “my films were about gay characters. They were what brought me out of the closet. That’s what my interest was, the gay characters and gay stories. And I was gay, when my private life became my public life.”9 For him, gay is “a political term that’s printable, and so it’s printed.” But he claimed: “It’s not exactly how I orient my life. It’s not how I view myself.”10 As a result of his philosophy, the director has declined to problematize gay identity and sexuality in his films, based on his background and his belief that there is nothing problematic about gay men or gay subcultures. For him, gay subcultures are among the many distinct subcultures that coexist alongside other distinct subcultures in society, be they defined by age, social class, or ethnic background.
Van Sant’s most articulate statement on the issue is found in a Rolling Stone interview: “I haven’t really personally felt any discrimination, but I’m not really that spotable as a gay male. Your sexuality is a private thing—and as far as culture goes, I don’t think of a gay culture as separate from mass culture. I just look at it as human culture. It’s obvious there’s all kinds of stuff oriented toward heterosexual culture, because that’s the majority, but it’s also oriented toward white culture, because that’s also the majority. It’s not surprising, and it doesn’t bother me.”11 For him, it’s a matter of perspective, of one’s membership and reference groups, to use a more sociological jargon. As he explained: “Inside certain artistic cultures, a lot of friends of mine that are straight feel left out, because the major composers and artists of this century are all gay. They feel inferior to the point where they wish they were gay. So it just depends on what group you want to join.”12 He has not used same-sex relationships in his films as social messages or political statements, even when such relationships occupy the center of his films, as in Mala Noche or, most notably, in Milk.
Van Sant has not been a political activist; as he explained: “I don’t think you have to align your whole life in any particular quest, unless you want to. The work itself is the political part. But me as a spokesperson, no. I’m just a person behind the camera.”13 Nonetheless, he liked the idea that many of his films had premiered as benefits for gay causes—specifically, AIDS. For example, To Die For, which is not a gay film, premiered in New York City on September 25, 1995, as a fund-raiser for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
PERSONAL MOVIES
Like other intellectually curious youths who came of age in the 1960s, Van Sant opened himself up to the subcultures of the Hippie and Beat Generations. He read and cherished such writers as Beatnik Jack Kerouac (his seminal On the Road), gay Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg (Howl), and especially Burroughs (whose surreal, drug-infused literature includes Naked Lunch). He has never concealed his experimentation with drugs; as he confided in 1989: “Drugs played a big role in my life in the 1960s and 1970s, and I was pretty familiar with pot and LSD during that period.”14
Like Almodóvar, who is older by three years, Van Sant has made eighteen features to date, though unlike Almodóvar and Haynes, at least half of his features are based on previously published sources or scripts not written by him. As writer and director, he has adapted to the screen Tom Robbins’s novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which features a diverse cast (Keanu Reeves, Roseanne Barr, Uma Thurman, and k. d. lang). My Own Private Idaho, his most original and celebrated film, which featured two up-and-coming stars, Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, also derives from existing sources on which he has unmistakably put his idiosyncratic signature.
Based on relatively low budgets, Van Sant’s movies have examined the lives of individuals who inhabit society’s underground. However, despite their bleak circumstances, his films display a nihilistic, often subtle humor—but are decidedly not camp. He has made wildly subjective pictures that celebrate outsiders: illegal immigrants, male hustlers, dropouts, and drugstore cowboys. In depicting drug addicts and male prostitutes, he has revealed their humanity without exploiting their tawdriness. His eccentric POV provides an intimate look at down-and-out characters—individuals on the fringes of society—which he neither glorifies nor condemns. He doesn’t expect his audience to take such a stance either. It’s as if his camera was looking through a peephole, dropping in on secret lives and exposing their elements. Though drawn to realistic issues and grounded characters, he treats them playfully. Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman has justifiably singled out “the unabashed beatnik quality to Van Sant’s worldview.”15 The director’s attraction to street youths and their sordid milieu is based on his belief that they are more interesting to observe and that there’s more drama in their lives than is the case with bourgeois characters.
In his first three films, which are thematically linked, Van Sant showed a natural lyrical touch and an instinctive feel for recording lowlifes that is free of any judgment—there was neither condescension nor romanticizing.
Van Sant’s first feature, Mala Noche (Bad Night), put him on the map of the then nascent independent cinema. It follows the doomed infatuation of Walt (Tim Streeter), a clerk in a skid-row convenience store, with the hunky Mexican immigrant and street hustler Johnny (played by Doug Cooeyate, a Pueblo Indian), who barely understands English. The film’s source material is a novella by Walt Curtis, a Portland street poet. The director kept the manuscript, which was “sexually explicit like a dirty book,” under his bed for years, reading and rereading it, eagerly waiting for the time he could translate it into a personal film.
Mala Noche begins with images of outsiders, down-and-out characters in the marginalized section of Portland’s inner city. After the credits, there is a slogan: “If you fuck with the bull, you get the horn.” Walt, a thirty-something white homosexual, likes the company of migrant workers. Van Sant cast his leads with local Portland figures that do not look like Hollywood actors playing male hustlers, as was the case with handsome Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s glorified portrait American Gigolo. Thus, Walt is played by Streeter, a plain, chubby, ordinary-looking Seattle stage actor.
The main thread of the plot is Walt’s sexual attraction to Johnny, an illegal newcomer who wanders into his shop. Van Sant shows the Northwest landscape from Johnny’s POV, first seen from a railroad boxcar. The narrative, which is slight in ideas but rich in imagery, unfolds as a variation of amour fou, in which a mature Caucasian man is first infatuated and then obsessed with a Mexican youngster who doesn’t care about him. By the standards of most characters in American cinema, Walt is a loser—he is unkempt and unshaven, wears an old and dirty raincoat, and spends hours in seedy bars drinking. He proudly declares to a female friend: “I’m in love with this boy. I don’t care even if it jeopardizes working at the store. I have to show him I’m gay for him.”
Johnny, like other runaways and street hustlers, enjoys playing with his buddies in a video arcade. Insisting he is straight, he says he doesn’t like putos, a pejorative term for homosexuals. In Almodóvar’s films, the straight men use the equally pejorative term maricones. Nonetheless, Johnny makes exceptions if the gringos have money—cash money—and cars. Socializing with white gay men is tolerated so long as they provide materialistic favors, functioning as “friends with benefits.” Essentially, Johnny exploits Walt, eating at his expense and driving around in his car. Never mind that the vehicle is ramshackle; it still enables Johnny to show off to his Mexican mates, who are poorer than he is.
Johnny’s closest buddy is Roberto, nicknamed Pepper, played by local amateur boxer Ray Mongue. Based on mutual exploitation, the relationship between Walt, as the older mentor-tutor, and Johnny and Pepper, as the uneducated but desirable simpletons, is peculiar, to say the least. It is defined by occasional sexual encounters and laced with touches of sadomasochism. When Walt allows Pepper to drive his car, the boy proves to be a lousy driver, landing the car in a ditch, despite Walt’s careful instruction. “You drive like you fuck,” the exasperated Walt says.
When Johnny mysteriously disappears, Walt switches his attention to Pepper, taking care of him when he is ill and trying to have sex with him (in any position Pepper consents to). Melodrama kicks in when the police arrives at Walt’s place and Pepper, afraid of being deported, attempts to flee with a stolen gun in his hand, forcing the police to shoot him. All that Walt can do is hold the dead boy in his arms.
In the next sequence, Walt spots Johnny, who had been sent back to Mexico as an illegal alien but managed to come back to Portland. Their friendship resumes until Johnny finds out about Pepper’s death, for which he unfairly blames Walt. Rushing out in anger, he writes puto on Walt’s door and leaves. Unfazed, the passive-aggressive Walt continues to pursue Johnny, and the tale ends ambiguously with Walt driving down the street.
It’s hard to describe Walt’s encounters with Pepper as real lovemaking, reflecting Van Sant’s shy personality, his conservative upbringing, and the refusal of his “actors” to be shown naked or engaged in any explicit sexual positions. There’s extreme cautiousness in showing briefly frontal nudity, when Walt strips off his clothes. Van Sant just shows Pepper spread on a sleeping bag on the floor. Through meticulous editing and darkly shadowed intercuts, the director creates the illusion of intercourse, focusing on the participants’ faces rather than their bodies. As a director, he didn’t like the way sex was depicted in Hollywood movies because “a lot of times sex scenes become a bumping and grinding activity, which is not particularly sexy.”16 This ultracareful approach to sex would continue to characterize his films, even when they concern straight lovemaking, such as the oral sex between Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix in To Die For.
Van Sant’s motivation behind Mala Noche was to make an honest, nonjudgmental movie about a subject that mainstream Hollywood would never touch. He financed the black-and-white film himself and shot it on cut-rate stock. The meager $25,000 budget came from Van Sant’s savings after years of working at an advertising agency in New York. Low as its price was, however, it took almost a decade for the film to recoup its expense.
Van Sant said that Mala Noche was inspired, among other things, by the commercial appeal of the 1981 gay movie Taxi Zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilet), which screened at the New York Film Festival and then played commercially in New York’s Cinema Studio (my neighborhood) for months. In that personal movie, German director Frank Ripploe chronicles in graphic detail and with dark yet realistic humor the sexual adventures of a gay schoolteacher in West Berlin. The film culminates boldly with the teacher coming out (in drag) in front of his pupils in class. Van Sant was encouraged that Taxi Zum Klo “was making a lot of money and though it was so out there, very straight audiences went to see it. I remember that being a signal that I could make a film about a gay character and get my money back.”17
Other artistic influences on Van Sant included David Lynch, who shot his first two movies—the underground Eraserhead in 1977 and the studio-financed, star-driven The Elephant Man in 1980—in heightened black-and-white contrasts. The former, produced with assistance from the American Film Institute while Lynch was studying there, was particularly influential in its lighting style and expressionist visuals. Mala Noche contains expressive close-ups of Mexican youths; dark shots of ashtrays, cigarettes, and smoke; and other images that fit into the tale’s nocturnal nature.
The locations in Mala Noche are the grim sites of Portland’s Burnside region: shabby buildings, rundown motels, cheap grocery stores, and filthy streets. Mixing distinctive exterior vistas of the Pacific Northwest with nihilistic, darkly humorous sensibility marked the arrival of an exciting talent. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael singled out the film’s “authentic grungy beauty” and its “wonderfully fluid grainy look,” which she found expressionist yet made with an improvised feel that recalls Jean Genet’s short film, Un chant d’amour.18 (Genet proved to be an inspirational figure to all the filmmakers in this book.) Mala Noche received scant attention before winning the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Independent Film, in appreciation of its authentically personal nature. This recognition emphasized the importance of critics for the promotion of esoteric fare, turning Mala Noche into a staple of the festival and art-house circuits.
It took years for Mala Noche to get a legitimate theatrical distribution beyond the festival circuit—until December 1989 to be exact—and to recoup its expense. Contrary to Van Sant’s expectations, Mala Noche was perceived and received as a more ghettoized film than Taxi Zum Klo. By that time, he was already in his late thirties and about to release his next feature, Drugstore Cowboy. Following Kael, other critics responded favorably, as evident in the review of Peter Rainer, a Kael protégé: “The ardor in this film isn’t only in its love story; it’s also in Van Sant’s experimental, poetic use of the medium.” Rainer stated that “Van Sant can’t pretend true nihilism, because he is too enraptured in the possibilities of his new-found art.”19 Other critics also singled out the director’s penchant for depicting the romanticism of losers, without succumbing to soft-headedness or sentimentalism. In the Washington Post, Hal Hinson observed: “Van Sant is fascinated by the poetic allure of poor beautiful boys riding the rails into the Promised Land and ending up dead, crumpled on the pavement in the middle of a street, thousands of miles away from home.”20
Mala Noche has remained a model of film grunge for young independent directors. It displays ideas and themes that would recur in Van Sant’s future works: unfulfilled love, unrequited romantic yearning, and a vivid sense of life’s ironies and absurdities. Most relevant to this book’s concerns is his refusal, from the beginning of his career, to treat homosexuality (and sexual orientation) as a “problem” or a phenomenon that needs to be discussed or judged in any explicit way. The sexual orientation (lesbians and straights included), sexual practices, and sexual identities of his characters are taken as given, alongside other social attributes. In Mala Noche, Johnny’s and Pepper’s Mexican backgrounds, minority status, social class, and outsider position are far more important than whether or not they sleep with Walt or how they perceive themselves sexually. The director doesn’t define Johnny and Pepper as male prostitutes; they are just street hustlers who would sleep with anyone for a few bucks.
Earning acclaim beyond the festival circuit, Mala Noche soon attracted Hollywood attention, and Van Sant was courted by the major studios, such as Universal. He pitched some ideas (that would materialize in future movies, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho), but the established companies showed no interest in such “esoteric” and “risque” projects.
Van Sant’s next film, Drugstore Cowboy in 1989, was a logical follow-up to Mala Noche, focusing on a gang of junkies who rob pharmacies to support their drug-induced lifestyle. Efforts to secure Hollywood backing for the project were thwarted by his nonjudgmental approach. It was, after all, the era of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No,” a hollow, sloganeering prescription for a drug-free America. The scenario was rich with procedural details of how to obtain and use drugs, and studio executives feared that the movie would promote drug abuse. Recalled Van Sant: “A lot of people in Hollywood said this is ‘an immoral film’ that promotes drug use.”21 Anticipating some backlash, he could see how the sympathetic characters could motivate amateur junkies to further their drug habits to an extreme. “The movie may make a junkie want to go out and take drugs,” Van Sant commented semiseriously, “but the movie isn’t a political statement about drugs.”22
A newly formed independent company, Avenue, which favored more personal, offbeat, and unorthodox films (such as Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me, in 1984), put up the necessary $6 million. The project was produced by Laurie Parker, who had a track record with such indie titles as Spike Lee’s striking debut, She’s Gotta Have It, and Jim Jarmusch’s widely praised sophomore, Down by Law, both of which came out in 1986. Going from the self-financed $25,000 budget of Mala Noche to the ultimately increased budget of $7 million was not just impressive; it also brought about significant changes in the filmmaking process: preproduction, casting, shooting, and editing. The bigger budget enabled Van Sant to work with a professional ensemble, headed by Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch; to cast one of his heroes, novelist William S. Burroughs Jr., as a junkie priest; and to pay all of his actors decent fees.
The film’s script, cowritten by Van Sant and Daniel Yost, a journalist for the Oregonian, was based on an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle, an inmate at the Washington State Penitentiary. Fogle claimed that the lead, Bob Hughes, was a composite character made up of several drugs thieves, but others felt that the novel incorporated many of Fogle’s own experiences. The director was attracted to the gritty quality of the writing and to the subjective perspective of the central con man, who is also the narrator. To ensure authenticity, he ran his ideas by Jim Carroll, the former drug abuser and author of The Basketball Diaries, a critically acclaimed memoir about the drug culture, published in 1978 and made into a 1995 movie, starring the young Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg. Other texts that inspired Drugstore Cowboy included Junkie, the pioneering 1953 chronicle by Burroughs, and Larry Clark’s books of illuminating photographs, Tulsa and Teenage Lust, which portray drug addicts in graphic mode. Van Sant would produce Larry Clark’s feature-directing debut, Kids, in 1995 (see the discussion later in this chapter).
Remarkably, Van Sant was able to avoid turning the film into a platform for an antidrug message. As he explained: “Not being a drug addict myself, I was making it for myself, and for the lay public, as a way of experiencing the life of a drug addict.” In fact, for him, Drugstore Cowboy was an antidrug story: “It was like an anti-war film that has a lot of killing in it. My position on drugs comes through if somebody is really looking for it, and though my position is admittedly lightly ambiguous, it was never my intention to make a pro-drug film.”23
Nonetheless, Van Sant felt strong enough pressures, forcing him to make several concessions or compromises. The tale’s setting was moved back to 1971, a more naïve era, in which dope and other drugs still projected an aura of cool hipness. The new historical setting eliminated the specter of AIDS and the effects of crack, the lethal drug of the 1980s. The subject matter was not entirely new: several bold movies about drugs had already been released, including Roger Corman’s LSD chronicle, The Trip, scripted by Jack Nicholson; Panic in Needle Park; and, of course, the Dennis Hopper-Peter Fonda iconic Easy Riders, in 1969. Drugstore Cowboy makes no references to politics or to the outside reality of the Vietnam War, the Columbia University Student Revolution, the Kent State Massacre, or President Nixon.24 The director also turned Bob into a more sympathetic character by adding self-redemption to the tale. In the last chapter, Bob decides to go straight, checking into a rehab facility. And in the ambiguous finale, having been shot and wounded, Bob is taken in an ambulance to the hospital.
Casting the good-looking and charismatic Matt Dillon as Bob made the antihero even more likable. In his appealing screen persona, he combined street toughness and emotional vulnerability, traits that are crucial for humanizing Bob’s character. Dillon, then twenty-five, was a heartthrob who made an impression in his 1979 debut, Over the Edge, and then in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders in 1983, but in the late 1980s, his career was already in decline. As much as his director, he needed a good movie to put him back on the map.
A chronicle of the (mis)adventures of petty criminals, Drugstore Cowboy provides an inside view of the drug world and its inhabitants, youths proud of their aimless existence. Though lyrically shot and boasting an offbeat nonchalant tone, by Van Sant’s standards the film is a tad too conventional in its linear narrative. The film-journal follows a quartet of bumbling outlaws that forms sort of a nuclear family. The clan is made up of Bob; his wife, Dianne (Kelly Lynch); the younger member, Rick (James LeGros); and Rick’s girlfriend, Nadine (Heather Graham). The two couples differ in age and experience. Bob and Dianne are married and in their late twenties; Rick and Nadine are naïve and younger, in their early twenties. In many ways, the younger ones function as surrogate children—similar to the way that Sal Mineo’s latently gay Plato related to his classmates’ parents, James Dean and Natalie Wood, in Nicholas Ray’s 1955 cult classic, Rebel Without a Cause.
In the opening scene, Bob struts down the street, complimenting a female pedestrian on her hat, stopping by a water fountain, and then heading into the pharmacy he plans to rob. He is followed by the gang’s members, who enter one by one in order to distract the owner’s attention. Suddenly, Nadine fakes a seizure that creates a chaotic panic, giving Bob an opportunity to sneak into the offices and clean out the shelves. By the time the alarmed pharmacist calls for an ambulance, Nadine simply gets up and leaves—to the amazement of the customers there. After the heist, Bob shoots up in the backseat of the getaway car driven by Dianne, who reproaches him for being impatient.
As Bob trips, we see his subjective reverie in which various objects float—spoons, toys, airplanes, cows, and chickens—reflecting Bob’s childlike and childish nature. It’s Van Sant’s homage to The Wizard of Oz, the MGM fantasy film that has influenced every director in this book (and many others, like David Lynch). The druggies practice their craft, robbing drugstores and hospital pharmacies for only one purpose, to satisfy their personal needs. They aim low: all they hope for is to elude the law and find a new haven—at least for a while—and this temporary haven is treated by Van Sant as a fairy-tale land.
Early on, they are visited by David (Max Perlman), a young junkie who lives nearby. Feeling superior, Bob treats David with contempt; there will be grave repercussions for his mistreatment. Occasionally, the gang’s motel rooms or temporary apartments are ransacked by law enforcers, led by Gentry (James Remar), a narcotics officer who is engaged in a cat-and-mouse chase with Bob and is determined to throw him behind bars. Bob concocts an intricate plan that causes one of Gentry’s officers to be shot by an angry neighbor. Bob manipulates the neighbor, claiming that the neighborhood is unsafe at night and that there are all kinds of strangers climbing up ladders and peering into the residents’ bedrooms. Later, when Gentry beats up Bob in retaliation, Bob knows that their luck in this particular location had ended, and they leave in a hurry. “The Israelites,” the popular tune by Desmond Dekker and the Aces, injects joy, vitality, and continuity as the band moves from one location to another.
On a rare excursion outside of their immediate locale, Bob and Dianne visit his mother (Grace Zabriskie), not because he misses her but for practical reasons—to get his remaining clothes or steal cash from her. In one of their drugstore raids, they get the strong drug Dilaudid, which Van Sant shows in close-ups to accentuate the “wow” effect. Later on, Bob narrowly misses the police at a motel when, ironically, the law officers meet for a convention and his room is needed.
Unfortunately, when they are on one of their missions, Nadine overdoses and dies. While Nadine’s corpse is hidden in the ceiling crawlspace, Bob has a nightmare in which he sees himself caught and handcuffed. Believing that Nadine’s death is an omen, he decides to abandon drugs, but he leaves alone, as Dianne cannot exist without drugs and doesn’t wish to reform.
At a rundown hotel, Bob encounters Tom (Burroughs), a former priest and longtime addict who had initiated Bob into substance abuse. Displaying an acting style that differs from the naturalistic performances of the other members, Burroughs raves in long, angry, feverish monologues. Dianne later visits Bob, insensitively leaving him drugs, which he hands to the more appreciative Tom. Their farewell is decidedly unsentimental: Dianne tells Bob that she is now working for Rick, who is also her lover. Shortly after, David breaks into Bob’s room, and when Bob claims that he has no drugs, David shoots him. Earlier Bob had interrupted a street fight, stopping David from harassing a crying teenager. But, again, living by his inner code, Bob refuses to rat on David and doesn’t inform Gentry as to who had shot him.
Subjectively, the members of the quartet see themselves as romantic figures, sort of contemporary Bonnies and Clydes. However, Van Sant takes a more satirical approach, emphasizing their foolish petty crimes and the fact that their robberies involve low stakes. They steal drugs for self-consumption, not for profit, and some of their adventures end in a shambles. Their lives are devoted to pleasure, and their activities are subsumed under the goal of, as Bob says, “getting happy and staying happy.”
A comedy of the absurd, defined by expressionist visuals and a surreal tone, Drugstore Cowboy is more humorous than grim or somber, which it could have been in the hands of another director. Van Sant makes the story less bleak, without sacrificing the spirit of the original source material. The text’s offbeat absurdity derives from his insights into the peculiarities of the junkie subculture and from his idiosyncratic direction. Observed from the POV of the junkies, the film depicts their states of high, when they are on drugs, and their states of low, on the rare occasions when they are sober.
The film’s spirit is deliberately removed from reality: Van Sant does not try to show their experiences from a “more objective” perspective. The tale unfolds as a fairy tale where everything (almost) works out in the end. When the characters are high, they are goofy and funny, but there is also the downside, when the junk wears out. Drugstore Cowboy is a black comedy about addicts who are immoral but not amoral. In fact, far from being unprincipled, they live by a strict code of ethics that dictates how to behave in varying conditions. Bob has his own set of rules as to what is right and what is wrong, and he is extremely superstitious about what brings him good or bad luck. The gang’s “Ten Commandments” are expressed by Bob when he is sober: “You should never look at the back side of the mirror, because you’ll be looking at your inner self. The owner of a hat may have the evil eye, so if anyone puts a hat on a bed, it signals trouble.” All cats, not just black, are bad, and talking about dogs is really bad, as is shown in a flashback about the tragic death of Bob’s own dog.
Van Sant avoids preaching a hypocritical antidrug message, maintaining a nonjudgmental attitude toward his characters. He said that he didn’t want the characters to do anything that was inconsistent in order to just satisfy generic conventions of Hollywood movies or to please the expectations of audiences conditioned by mainstream cinema. The humor is low-key but not punched up, and even the witty one-liners are not overemphasized. In a scene between the always-horny Dianne and the laid-back and not particularly sexual Bob, Dianne complains, “You don’t fuck me anymore, and I have to drive.” While in the methadone program, the shamelessly unrepentant Bob explains to the drug counselor (played by Bea Richards, Sidney Poitier’s mother in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) that people who use drugs are trying to “relieve the pressures of everyday life, like having to tie their shoes.”
The frenetic life of petty crime and drugs defines a subculture that’s both specific and restrictive. The members’ sole focus—their raison d’être—is satisfying their drug needs in the fastest way possible. Their world is guided, as Bob says in one of his voice-overs, by “the dark forces that lie hidden beneath the surface, the ones that some people call superstitions, howling banshees, black cats, hats on beds, dogs, the evil eye.”
Refreshingly, the characters do not represent familiar types. Bob is street-smart but superstitious, living by his wits, showing intuitive feelings as to when to move ahead with the raid and when to lay low. He claims that inner voices tell him: “Get out there and get it. It’s there for the taking. It’s free this week.” Dianne, Bob’s drug-dependent wife, is feisty, tough, and randy. Rick, Bob’s second in command, is a minor-league criminal, full of contradictions: he could be clear but also vapid, tough but also gentle, goofy and serious. Nadine, the amateur grifter, is a confused, insecure girl who needs to be loved. Though a novice, she tries to assimilate into the group (too) quickly. She insists on getting her fair share after her first heist and demands to shoot up, just like the rest of the clique.
With all my admiration, the film is not flawless. The secondary roles—including David, the neighborhood druggie and small-time dealer, and especially Gentry, the pursuing police officer—are underdeveloped and used mostly to fulfill plot points. Burroughs appears as Tom, the former priest, in the last, nearly surreal sequence, set in Seattle’s shabby St. Francis Hotel. Initially, Tom had been written as a pathetic loser, but with his pride, gravitas, and acting, Burroughs elevates him to another level. His strong interpretation, however, makes the role bigger and stronger, and in some ways, he throws the film off balance because the other actors engage in more naturalistic performances.
If Almodóvar and Haynes tend to defamiliarize the familiar aspects of life, Van sant likes to do the opposite, to show ordinary objects in extraordinary ways, reflecting the protagonists’ skewed vision, particularly when they are high. In Bob’s reveries, objects float on and off the screen or spin against swirling clouds whose colors change. After burying Nadine, for example, Bob experiences another vision, in which hats are flying in front of his eyes. The usual stylistic device of showing objects in close-ups, first impressing in Mala Noche, recurs here with coffee cups, lightbulbs, lit cigarettes, and cluttered ashtrays. Often punctuating the end of a scene, the objects are used as abstractions of visuals that reflect Bob’s fertile mind and distorted memory but that also express the director’s idiosyncratic vision.
The careful choice of décor contributes in establishing the film’s offbeat tone. In Drugstore Cowboy, green is the dominant color: there are green cars, green clothes for Dianne, green furniture, and green walls, not to mention the natural green of the Pacific Northwest.25 The movie was shot in the late fall, and the dry season with its overcast skies allowed cinematographer Robert Yeoman to shoot most of the outdoor scenes in natural light. The costume design is distinctive, too, replacing the customary Hollywood gear of tight blue jeans and torn white T-shirts, worn by James Dean and Marlon Brando in their rebel movies (Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One, respectively). Instead, Bob wears V-neck and mohair sweaters, velour shirts, and plaid slacks, and the director makes sure that we observe the brown shoes that he wears, in lieu of the customary sneakers or boots in mainstream Hollywood movies.
Critic Paul Andrews singled out the quality of Drugstore Cowboy for its blend of “absurdist humor with near-documentarian realism.” In this movie, he wrote, “drugs have a certain fascination. They open up your consciousness. They’re fun. They carry the danger of any addiction, but do not turn everyone’s brain to fried eggs. They’re like fast food, except that fast food takes longer to kill you and is legal.”26 For Kael of The New Yorker, Van Sant’s films are “an antidote to wholesomeness” because they manage to achieve a controlled style out of the random and the careless.27 Indeed, Drugstore Cowboy was an antidote to John Hughes’s naïve youth movies, such as Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, and others, starring the Brat Pack, which were produced at the same time. It was also a counterpoint to yuppie films made in the late 1980s, such as Less than Zero, about rich upper-class youths.
The National Society of Film Critics (NSFC) named Drugstore Cowboy the Best Picture of 1989, Van Sant the Best Director, and his original scenario the Best Screenplay. The scenario was also honored by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Van Sant was the surprise winner of the NSFC over such promising talents as Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh, both of whom made breakthrough films that year—Do the Right Thing and sex, lies, and videotape, respectively. Both films played at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, and sex, lies, and videotape won the festival’s top Jury award, the Palme d’Or. A major contender for the Spirit Awards (the Oscars for indies), Drugstore Cowboy swept many kudos: screenplay, male lead (Dillon), supporting male (LeGros), and cinematography (Robert Yeoman).
Commercially, the movie grossed $4.7 million in its initial theatrical release, an impressive figure for an American indie but not vis-à-vis its considerable budget of $7 million. Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape was made for $1.2 million and grossed $25 million, and Lee’s debut cost much less but earned over $7 million. Nonetheless, the picture performed better in ancillary markets, on video and DVD. More important than box-office gross was the critical acclaim: Drugstore Cowboy furthered Van Sant’s reputation as a gifted director who could make personal yet accessible indies. It also helped revitalize the career of Matt Dillon, who would appear in Van Sant’s To Die For in 1995.
Films with similar themes or issues often appear in cycles, as was the case with the new black cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The work of Lee (Do the Right Thing in 1989), John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood in 1991), and others was energized by the broader sociopolitical context of American society at that time. Similarly, specific factors have affected gay cinema of the 1990s, prime among which was the AIDS epidemic. For years, there was fearful avoidance of dealing with the AIDS phenomenon, and then controversy erupted over the kind of “morally responsible yet realistic” entertainment that artists should be making about AIDS. As I showed earlier, this dilemma became clear in the reception of Haynes’s Poison, which came out in 1991, the same year that Van Sant made My Own Private Idaho.
The exploration in Drugstore Cowboy of young hustlers living on society’s outer fringes, as well as the film’s Portland settings, is also manifest in the critically acclaimed My Own Private Idaho, arguably Van Sant’s strongest, most ambitious feature. Once again, he chose a subjective perspective, presenting the narrative from the POV of the protagonist, Mike Waters, an apocalyptic street hustler. In earlier versions, the director entertained other titles for his film, such as In a Blue Funk and Minions of the Moon. The film’s ultimate moniker derives from a song lyric by the rock group B-52 and also from Van Sant’s trips to Idaho. He has always regarded Idaho as more than just a geographic place—for him, it is a state of mind, a refuge taken for comfort.
After the critical and commercial success of Drugstore Cowboy, the studios courted Van Sant with lucrative offers, but he resisted the mainstream. His interest in My Own Private Idaho was deemed “too risky” by the studios. After all, one of the very first scenes depicts the hero, Mike, having oral sex for pay with an older man in a seedy motel. However, with the support of bright young executive Cam Galano of New Line Cinema, the director got the green light for a $2.6 million movie, to be released by Fine Line Features, the art division of New Line, soon to be headed by the entrepreneurial Ira Deutschmann.
A personal film, My Own Private Idaho reflects some of Van Sant’s own experiences. Michael Parker, a homeless street hustler who smokes pot, served as inspiration for the character of Mike. Scott Favor, the tale’s other lead, is a rich boy who goes slumming in the underbelly of Portland and Seattle. As the product of an upper-class family, the director could relate more easily to Scott: “Scott is, or could be, me, coming from the blue-blood and royalty of Portland.”28 The project became even more personal when he cast himself in the film as the ponytailed bellboy in the Idaho hotel.
While the film was in the planning phases, Michael Parker was supposed to play Mike, and Rodney Harvey was going to be Scott. Both were close to Van Sant: Parker played the harassed youth in Drugstore Cowboy, and Harvey, an Andy Warhol alumnus, was pulled out of that picture due to drug problems. But the critical acclaim of Drugstore Cowboy enabled the director to send the script to bigger casting agencies. After struggling with some talent managers due to the script’s risqué contents, he was able to get a high-profile ensemble, headed by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in the lead roles of Mike and Scott, the appealing street hustlers. In a bizarre turn of events that seldom happens, the real-life hustlers on which the fictional Mike and Scott are based appear in the movie in smaller roles.
The film is cast with eccentric actors, many of whom are veterans of Van Sant’s previous efforts. The chicken hawk Bob Pigeon, an unappealing part, is played by filmmaker William Richert (Winter Kill, among others). Robert Lee “Bob” Pitchlynn (a veteran of bits in previous Van Sant films and the inspiration for the Bob Pigeon character) was cast as Walt, the first john who performs fellatio on Mike. Grace Zabriskie, who had played Matt Dillon’s mother in Drugstore Cowboy, appears as a wealthy matron who pays for the company of younger men. The European gentleman Hans, a traveling car parts salesman who likes male hustlers, was played by German actor and cult figure Udo Kier, who had earlier scored in Warhol’s productions of Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein.
My Own Private Idaho won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay, and it also gained River Phoenix the Best Actor honor at the Venice Film Festival. Quite established for his age, Phoenix had already impressed in Stand by Me (1986) and received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Running on Empty (1988), Sidney Lumet’s political melodrama. Van Sant’s feature also helped Keanu Reeves, then best known for his Bill and Ted movies, to get better screen roles.
Thematically, the film explores the notions of being an outsider (even if one belongs to the upper class or power elite), family abandonment, unrequited love, self-estrangement, social alienation, and the meaning of friendship and family bonds. All these are concepts that Van Sant had explored and would continue to examine in future films.
As usual with Van Sant, the screenplay was a reflection of all the literary sources that he had absorbed up to that point. He publicly acknowledged, in addition to Shakespeare, the influence of playwright Sam Shepard—specifically, in the intense scenes in which Mike and Scott visit Mike’s brother, Richard (played by James Russo). In those scenes, significant revelations are made about their troubled family past: how their unstable mother fell for a gambler-cowboy who did not love her; how Richard spent time in a mental institution; and how their mom shot her beau in a movie house while they were watching Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks’s 1959 cult Western, starring John Wayne. Says Richard: “The popcorn spread all over the floor soaked with blood,” an image seen in a powerful flashback.
Van Sant has always admired John Rechy’s 1963 chronicle City of Night, which he read and reread in the 1970s while observing hustlers. The book helped him to understand the denizens of Hollywood Boulevard as they walk the streets aimlessly, go on the prowl, sit in coffee shops and video arcades, pass time between tricks and drug boosts, and crash at friends’ apartments. There were also negative points of reference, to use sociological jargon. Although Van Sant was impressed with the visual texture of Martin Bell’s acclaimed documentary Streetwise, which deals with homeless teenagers in Seattle, it was hard for him not to notice the conspicuous omission of male prostitutes from the narrative. The stark Streetwise was nominated for the 1984 Oscar, but, ironically, the winner that year was The Times of Harvey Milk about the gay politician, a figure that had intrigued Van Sant and that would be the subject of his 2008 film, Milk.
As a retelling of Shakespeare’s Henry V, now set among street hustlers, My Own Private Idaho is by turns nonchalant and touching, structurally loose but coherent, and graced with unexpected lyrical images and narrative hairpins. Shakespeare is used in the film to convey the transcendence of time, suggesting that Mike and Scott are figures that can—and do—exist anywhere and anytime. (That this is the case becomes clear in the film’s Rome sequences when Mike and Scott meet Italian youngsters who are both their counterparts and their clones.)
In this postmodern skid-row tale, Van Sant reworks ideas from Shakespeare in a light and playful mode. He must have also been inspired by Orson Welles’s 1966 film, Chimes at Midnight, which is based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, with the then portly and grandly operatic Welles as Falstaff. Having teenage hustlers lapse into Shakespearean verse, in a deliberately modern and stilted way, didn’t always work for some critics, but it suited the story and added an original touch. Spectators used to more conventional fare found the film’s veering off the narrative track disturbing and problematic. For them, the tale was like a pileup of open parentheses, within parentheses, that never got fully closed (by design, as far as Van Sant is concerned).29 This kind of critique points to the expectations of those critics who favor clear closures over ambiguity and uncertainty.
Upon closer look, however, My Own Private Idaho reads more like an expanded version of Van Sant’s earlier films, elevating their issues to a more lyrical and symbolic level. A narcoleptic hustler, Mike is haunted by his mother’s abandonment when he was a boy. One of the narrative’s strands depicts Mike’s desperate and obsessive search for his mother, reversing the conventions of most Hollywood movies, in which it is the parents who search for their missing children or relatives—from John Ford’s seminal The Searchers all the way to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, and John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest. Throughout, the director inserts images of Mike’s mother caressing him as an adolescent (though emotionally he’s still a child) while reassuring him, “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.” Later on, brief vignettes of the mother and Mike as a baby are also shown, evoking the image of Madonna and La Pieta (which, as I showed, also appears in Almodóvar’s oeuvre).
The ailment of narcolepsy is a metaphor for the effects that Mike’s emotional life has on his physical life, and vice versa, the impact of his illness on his helplessness as a hustler. But narcolepsy also fulfills a narrative function as a time-traveling device and as a way to segue from one locale to another. Structurally, the film is divided into chapters, each set in a different place, which is indicated by a title card. The narrative begins in Seattle and then moves to Portland, Idaho, and Rome before ending back in Portland. Mike is observed falling asleep in one site and then being carried away while sleeping or reawakening by himself in another place.
Mike falls in love with Scott, a fellow hustler who stands to inherit a fortune from his father, Portland’s paraplegic mayor; in Shakespeare’s plays, he was the king’s son. Until then, Scott looks on Bob Pigeon, the raucous, cocaine-dealing braggart and the film’s equivalent of Falstaff, as his “true father.” Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal figure, Scott intends to renounce his street life and repudiate his friends when his father dies, which he does in a heartbreaking scene set at the cemetery.
My Own Private Idaho begins and closes with a similar image. In the opening scene, Mike falls asleep on an empty road in Idaho; at the end, Mike again experiences a narcoleptic episode when he physically collapses. While sleeping, a truck stops by, and two men steal his belongings, including his shoes. Shortly thereafter, another car stops by, and its unseen driver puts Mike’s body in his vehicle before speeding away. In these images, the circular narrative celebrates the romance of the road and drifting as a uniquely American lifestyle.
Once again, Van Sant courted controversy in treating the homoerotic exploits of hustlers. All along, Van Sant insisted that it was not a gay story, a label that was attached to the film in the prerelease publicity due to its subject matter. “It doesn’t bother me if people call it gay. The film was made by a gay person—me. But I don’t think it’s addressing a gay audience or issues in the gay world directly. It’s not done from a particular point of view about sexual orientation. It’s written with a general audience in mind.” Explaining his perspective, he claimed that the film’s hustlers think of themselves as straight—they are like “pirates, street people.” He elaborated: “It’s a film about an area of society—prostitution—that’s not defined in terms of gay or straight. The hustlers and their johns don’t think of themselves as gay. In real life, the clients, the paying johns, tend to be middle-class businessmen or construction workers with families.”30
Characteristically, Van Sant ignored warnings that male prostitution and homosexuality were taboos in the social climate of the early 1990s. The hysteria prevalent in American culture was a combined result of the public’s ignorance and the media’s deliberate neglect of the AIDS epidemic. That said, he was cautious in the specific way he depicted sex on screen, a function of his shy personality as well as his fear of alienating a major segment of the film’s potential audience, which was supposed to go beyond gay viewers.
In both Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant made sure not to depict the men’s lifestyle in a cheap, sleazy, or lurid manner. As he later commented: “The sex in My Own Private Idaho is not so important. It’s sort of something that they do as routine. As long as the audience got the idea that they are routine sexual objects, it isn’t really about sex.” To that extent, he shows the sexual encounters from the POV of the partners involved: “If you make the camera not a voyeur but a participant, you can get away with a little more. But it’s still a problem, because of our own perception of sex. I’m embarrassed by certain things. Being ‘bad’ is part of it, although it doesn’t have to be that way, and I know other cultures know that, but our culture is pretty uptight.”31
One of the most eccentric scenes, set in a porn shop with the covers of gay magazines talking to the audience, was shot at Portland’s Film Follies Bookstore. Initially, Van Sant wanted Mike’s magazine to say “G-String Jesus,” but it was changed to “G-String” in order to avoid offending the religious factor. The line is delivered while Mike is tied to a post, wearing a loincloth padded with foam rubber in order to make his crotch look bigger.
There was a lot of anxiety at New Line about other sexual aspects of the movie, as yet unseen by the top executives. Rolfe Mittweg, a senior vice president, was quoted in Premiere: “If Van Sant’s going to show erect dicks, I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Van Sant coolly responded: “Of course, it’s only a problem, because men get embarrassed when they see dicks on the screen.”32 The distributor sighed with relief upon seeing the final cut, in which there are no shots of penises, erect or otherwise.
None of the directors in this book has shown erect penises on screen. Waters showed flaccid penises early on in his career, and Almodóvar has presented several such images. It is still one of the biggest taboos in world cinema. If memory serves, only a handful of directors have broken this taboo. They include Denmark’s controversial filmmaker and enfant terrible Lars von Trier, in The Idiots and Antichrist; France’s enfant terrible Leos Carax, in Lovers on the Bridge, Pola X, and, most recently, Holy Motors; and, of course, Paul Morrissey, in his Dallesandro features.
In dealing with eros, Van Sant was guided by his philosophy that representing sex, rather than actually showing it, is more interesting. He wanted to give the viewers an idea of sex by showing still images of naked bodies in tableaux of specific positions but not relying on actual sexual movements. Taking a different approach would have turned the scenes into pornography and also would have changed their dramatic purpose. It was important to the director that the visual style of the explicitly gay scenes be varied and not stereotypical and that the sexual acts serve the narrative dramatically. For example, the scene in the coffee shop, when real-life hustlers Michael Parker and Scott Patrick Green and their cohorts spontaneously relate their first sex-for-pay adventures, was done in a realistic cinema verité mode. But the three-way orgy among Mike, Scott, and Hans was shot in a more stylized way. Finally, the seduction scene between Zabriskie, who’s dressed in white, and Mike in her salmon-colored bedroom ends on a funny, surreal note when Mike literally falls asleep in her arms as they begin making out. At that moment, the older Zabriskie is like Mike’s missing mother, holding her lover-boy and boy-lover in her arms in yet another suggestion of Madonna and La Pieta.
No doubt the film’s strongest emotions are evoked in the intimate interactions between Mike and Scott. When the two hit the road to Idaho on motorcycles to look for Mike’s mother, they take a break. Sitting at a campfire, Mike proposes to have sex in order to relieve their boredom. It was River Phoenix who expanded the three-page scene in the script into a long eight-page act, which he wrote by himself, inspired by the mood of the text and encouraged by his mate, Keanu Reeves. To express his genuine feelings for Scott, Mike says, “I love you, and you don’t have to pay me,” indicating the clear distinction between love and sex in his “other” life.
Mike’s sexual ambiguity is seen as integral to his state of emotional arrest and awkwardness. The scene in which Mike declares his love for Scott made Mike “more normal, more positive,” even though in Van Sant’s initial conception the character was unable to say something like that. The director explained: “I wanted them to fool around, to suck each other off, because they were in the desert and there was nothing to do.”33 That was the impulse of the scene and the reason why he makes Scott say, “No, man, I don’t do that.” In the released version, Mike tells Scott that he wants to kiss him, and the two embrace. It’s so dark, however, that it’s hard to see what exactly it is that they do, not to mention the fact that the scene ends abruptly.
The couple’s visit to Rome searching for Mike’s missing mother is propelled by the timeless quality of the Eternal City as well as by the place’s prevalent homoeroticism in Renaissance art. Male prostitution has been a tradition in Italian culture, inspiring many of its gay directors, such as Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini. What makes the foreign scenes distinctly American and Van Santian is that, as soon as the two arrive in Rome, they have a moment of recognition—they see male hustlers that are just like them. As James Parish noted, in a symbolic way, Mike and Scott meet their counterparts, who are essentially extensions of themselves.
With his exotic look, Keanu Reeves was extremely photogenic and beginning to rise in films like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure as well as Point Break, which he shot just before My Own Private Idaho. Van Sant was intrigued by Reeves’s photogeneity as well by his arch speech, which gave the Shakespearean scenes a more formal and artificial eloquence. When Mike and Scott communicate, it’s as if they speak their own secret language that makes sense only to them and that only they can fully understand it. The two actors’ differing styles complement each other. There is a playful, childlike spontaneity to Phoenix, a Method actor known for thoroughly researching each and every one of his roles. In contrast, Reeves is a more cerebral and detached actor whose physical stiffness and emotional clumsiness serve well the character as written by Van Sant.
Dominated by yellows and reds, the color palette that production designer David Brisbin chose for the picture was different from the green-dominated scheme of Drugstore Cowboy. More specifically, the salmon color is used extensively, as in the bedroom walls of Zabriskie’s home, the interiors of the house where Bob presides over the hustlers, and Mike’s zippered jacket and various shirts and T-shirts. The strong yellow color stands out in the various cars and taxis, the jackets of the cops who raid the house, the interiors, and the sunflower that Mike holds so touchingly toward the end.
Van Sant was hoping that his movie would have a broader exposure than Drugstore Cowboy, and it did, though not substantially. My Own Private Idaho grossed about $6.4 million at the domestic box office. However, far more important than the commercial success (especially by indie standards) was the near-universal critical acclaim. Many scholars and critics (myself included) consider the film to be the director’s masterwork.
In 1993, avoiding typecasting as a director with a narrow (male-oriented) range, Van Sant made a radical shift from the all-male terrain of My Own Private Idaho to the nearly all-female turf of Tom Robbins’s feminist manifesto, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. His first flop, both commercially and artistically, Even Cowgirls was the equivalent of the “sophomore jinx” that Soderbergh had experienced with his second feature, Kafka, in 1991, after the strong impact of sex, lies, and videotape. However, in Van Sant’s case, it was his fourth feature, excluding Alice in Hollywood. The movie boasted his biggest budget to date ($8.5 million) and a large, eclectic cast, including Uma Thurman, John Hurt, Keanu Reeves, and a newcomer, River Phoenix’s younger sister Rain (at River’s own suggestion). Testing poorly, the film was worked and reworked, but the end result remained disappointing. In my view, Even Cowgirls is one of weakest films the director has made.
The film promised a different kind of challenge, and Van Sant was glad to announce that in “Even Cowgirls, you don’t really get this sex-object angle, although at the same time you get the feeling that the writer is living in a fantasy in sex-object land. It’s sort of this other world, a city of women. The whole project is a great women’s film.” In this particular case, like Almodóvar, Van Sant evoked the spirit of the great gay “woman’s director” George Cukor: “It’s a chance to make the ultimate remake of The Women, which is a beautiful Cukor film from the 1930s.”34
The reality of the film, however, proved to be much different. The most original element of this misconceived picture is its title, deriving, of course, from the novel—it’s hard to beat that. Barely a year before she would be catapulted to stardom in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Thurman stars as Sissy, a woman destined to be the world’s greatest hitchhiker. Due to her large thumbs, Sissy grows up to become a beautiful woman and a champion hitchhiker. In due time, she becomes a spokesperson for the Yoni Yum line of women’s products made by the Countess (Hurt), a transsexual from Mississippi who has made a fortune in the hygiene industry. While in Manhattan, the Countess introduces Sissy, who is still a virgin, to her future husband, Julian Gitche (Keanu Reeves), a Native American artist who’s asthmatic. In typical Van Santian fashion, the mating between the two fails. Sissy incurs the wrath of the government when she joins a group of radical cowgirls who live at the Rubber Rose Ranch, the Countess’s commune in the Dakota Badlands. Fellow cowgirl Delores Del Ruby (Lorraine Bracco) sees the migration of the whooping crane as crucial to their political battle with the FBI.
During the long days and nights at the Rubber Rose, Sissy befriends the beautiful Bonanza Jellybean (Rain Phoenix), who finds a new use for Sissy’s thumbs. A mysterious foreigner, known only as the Chink (Pat Morita), enters Sissy’s world. Describing himself as the guardian of the universe’s secrets, he offers to pass his wisdom on to her. The long, verbose nocturnal scenes between Sissy and Chink are boring, almost bringing the film to a halt.
Most of the tale is set within the ranch, where the cowgirls are led by Bonanza, who becomes Sissy’s lover. Violence erupts when one of Sissy’s thumbs is amputated, but she continues to travel, while keeping in contact with Bonanza. From that point on, the narrative, thin in the first place, loses the little energy that it has. The women hold hostage the country’s last surviving flock of cranes. Sissy arrives just in time to witness the cowgirls and the ranchers holding off the authorities, who demand custody of the cranes. The cowgirls decide to surrender, but in the process, Bonanza gets killed by the ruthless government agents. In the unsatisfying resolution, the Chink, who had been living with Sissy and Delores, decides to leave for Florida.
Even Cowgirls lacks the narrative momentum, distinctive rhythm, and lyrical touches of Van Sant’s previous efforts. Thematically, though, Even Cowgirls belongs to his distinctive universe. All of his films are structured as odysseys of outsiders, journeys that celebrate the openness and endless possibilities of American life on the road. Sissy’s oversized thumbs make her an outcast who very much belongs to the director’s gallery of outsiders, and her odyssey is just as random and unpredictable as theirs. In his good films—Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and My Own Private Idaho—the stories are told from the subjective perspective of their characters. Even Cowgirls might have failed due to its lack of clear perspective and consistent POV. The protagonist, Sissy, remains an enigma, as Van Sant himself later acknowledged, “an object that you’re watching, as opposed to someone you’re watching the world through.”35
Though it was nice to see Van Sant working with a diverse group of talented actresses, such as Thurman and Bracco, he didn’t get particularly strong performances from them. Made right after My Own Private Idaho and served as the opening night of the prestigious Toronto Film Festival, the film was all the more visible and vulnerable to criticism. Fine Line, which distributed the film, incurred a major financial loss.
Unfazed by the failure, Van Sant pushed forward with two personal projects that came to fruition in 1995. Making his debut as executive producer, he was instrumental in the production of Kids, the screen debut of photographer Larry Clark. It was a most fitting collaboration, given the film’s theme and the fact that Clark’s photographs had served as references for Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and for his more general artistic sensibility. Miramax, the hottest indie studio of the 1990s, slipped Kids into the Sundance Film Festival as an unannounced midnight screening, and it immediately became the talk of the festival—the only controversial film that year. The screening’s clandestine nature, combined with Clark’s penchant for lurid subject matter, created a huge buzz and packed houses of attentive viewers.
In its bold approach, candid portrayal of sex and drugs, and frank language, Kids dwarfs Hollywood’s youth movies. Among other things, Kids was shocking because the roles were played by real teenagers of the right age, not Hollywood actors in their twenties, as was the norm; James Dean was twenty-five when he played a high schooler in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, and Sidney Poitier was thirty when he made Blackboard Jungle in the same year. In contrast, Kids feels more authentic in look and its impact more horrific due to the casting.
Set on a hot summer day, Kids presents a twenty-four-hour chronicle of young Manhattanites who hang out on the streets pursuing kicks, smoking pot, and guzzling booze. Parents may not like to acknowledge it, but the kids in this movie are perpetually and dangerously libidinous, and violent acts are part of their lives; incidents of gay baiting and black bashing are routine occurrences. In the opening scene, Telly (Leon Fitzpatrick), a horny, irresponsible fourteen-year-old, talks a naïve blonde (Sarah Hendersen) into the sack. As soon as the sex is over, the cocky kid hits the streets to boast to his buddies about his conquest. Telly’s monologue about his obsession with virginal girls and his plan to score another conquest that night is unsettling precisely because it’s so believable.
In the afternoon, the kids head to the local pool for some skinny-dipping and more sexual pranks. They finally crash at a friend’s apartment, where they get high and drunk again. Later that night, another virgin is victimized by the same swaggering and careless seducer. But it’s not just the boys who talk down and dirty. There’s also ultrafrank talk among the girls about their favorite sexual positions. Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) admits to her friends that she had lost her virginity to Telly, the only guy she has ever slept with.
Kids depicts never-before-seen acts of adolescent seduction, girls’ fears of losing their virginity, and boys’ aggressive anxiety to score and then brag about it. AIDS is a constant threat looming large in the foreground. Indeed, it’s all the more shocking when Jennie, one of the least promiscuous girls, is diagnosed as HIV-positive based on a single experience. Graphic depiction of youngsters indulging in unprotected sex and uninhibited booze results in an upsetting film. One of the most disturbing aspects of Kids is its ability to sustain genuine horror and voyeuristic fascination with “dubious” subject matter. It’s one thing to read about teenage sex in Time magazine; it’s another to see it on screen.
Clark, a middle-aged artist, captured the values, speech patterns, mannerisms, and sexual urges of his teenage ensemble because he won their trust. No doubt the filmmakers were helped by the screenplay written by Harmony Korine, then nineteen and a street kid himself, who shows a gutsy, beyond-the-boundaries sensibility. Clark, Van Sant, and Korine demonstrate their intuitive understanding of youth angst and burning libido. (Korine went on to become a director with a series of controversial films, beginning with the terrible feature Gummo in 1997; most recently, he completed the intriguing Spring Breakers.)
Cinematographer Eric Edwards, who had worked with Van Sant before, deploys a restless, mobile camera to give the film a striking visual quality and a deceptively improvisatory feeling. Kids achieves the remarkable feat of being technically polished and yet feeling like a compelling documentary. Like Van Sant’s work, Kids takes a nonjudgmental view toward urban youngsters, allowing viewers to make up their own minds about debatable contents. With hyper pacing and naturalistic (nonactorish) performances, Kids earns its claimed authenticity. At the same time, it walks a fine line between its moral intent as a cautionary tale, warning against the disregard for safe sex, and its undeniable voyeuristic, borderline exploitative elements.
Kids offered further proof of the vibrancy of the independent cinema in tackling difficult issues. Made in the tradition of cinema verité, it is a powerful exposé defined by its uncompromising take on kids’ behavior. Miramax, then owned by Disney, had problems securing a decent rating from the MPAA, which threatened an NC-17. Refusing to sacrifice the film’s artistic integrity, Miramax decided to create a new division, Shining Excalibur Pictures, specifically in order to release the film as is.
Over the next two decades, Van Sant produced or executive produced other films with gay themes and/or focused on troubled youth, such as Speedway Junky (1999); Tarnation (2003); Wild Tigers I Have Known (2006); Lightfield’s Home Videos (2006); Howl, about another of Van Sant’s literary heroes, Allen Ginsberg (2010); Act Up! (2012); and the three-hour Laurence Anyways (2012), from Xavier Dolan, Canada’s flamboyant gay director (whose films had their world premieres at the Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim).36
COURTING MAINSTREAM
The black comedy To Die For, which played at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival (out of competition) was Van Sant’s first effort for a major studio, Columbia. Its relative success paved the way for other, more commercial yet personal projects in the future. This loose adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s novel features Nicole Kidman as a murderously ambitious weather girl, offering the actress (then better known as Tom Cruise’s wife) her most fully realized part to date. Kidman had to fight to persuade the director that she was right for the part of Suzanne Stone, which was originally offered to Meg Ryan. Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman, and Bridget Fonda were also considered before Kidman landed the part, albeit for the reduced fee of $2 million.
Blending the thematic and stylistic conventions of a darkly humorous satire with those of a mockumentary, To Die For relies heavily on direct-to-the-camera monologues by Suzanne and personal commentaries on her behavior by the other participants. The novel that inspired the movie was loosely based on the factual trial of Pamela Smart, a school media services coordinator who was imprisoned for seducing a sixteen-year-old student and talking him into killing her husband. The trial was the first fully televised case in the United States. However, the film is considerably more satirical than Maynard’s straight treatment of the case.37
The film also features one of Van Sant’s favorite actors, Matt Dillon, as Suzanne’s hapless husband, and a third Phoenix sibling, Joaquin Phoenix, as her equally hapless young lover. River Phoenix had died from a drug overdose outside a nightclub in West Hollywood in 1993 in a much-publicized incident. The tragedy devastated the director, who was close friends with River and hoped to collaborate with him again, based on the fruitful teaming on My Own Private Idaho.
A mean-spirited comedy told in mock-tabloid fashion, To Die For traces the rise and fall of Suzanne, an ambitious girl obsessed with becoming a TV celebrity. Though living in the provincial town of Little Hope, New Hampshire, Suzanne dreams of being a world-famous anchor. To that end, she marries Larry Maretto (Dillon), whose successful family business offers a comfortable lifestyle. Whether primping for the camera as a weather anchor or pondering reality (“Everything is part of a big master plan”), Suzanne is sly, immoral, and amoral. Her TV-Age narcissistic philosophy is simple: “What’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if no one is watching.” As critic John Powers noted, Suzanne is “a peculiarly American monster who can transform anything, even murder, into what she calls a learning experience.”38
Larry starts nudging her to take time off from her career to start a family, and Suzanne, upset by the idea, decides to kill him. During a dancing project at her house while Larry is away, she seduces Jimmy Emmett (Phoenix), a lonely youngster, strong-arming him and his friends, delinquent Russell Heines (Casey Affleck) and the low self-esteemed Lydia Mertz (Alison Folland), into killing Larry. Jimmy, who’s initially hesitant, eventually complies when Suzanne offers sexual favors; she later threatens to leave him if he doesn’t kill her “abusive” husband. Jimmy commits the murder, after which he is ridden with guilt due to Larry’s calm demeanor during their struggle.
In their investigation, the police retrieve a “Teens Speak Out” video in which Jimmy hints at a relationship with Suzanne. Jimmy and Russell are arrested, but Lydia makes a deal with the police to talk to Suzanne with a secret tape recorder. Not as smart as she thinks she is, Suzanne unwittingly reveals her part in the murder. But despite evidence of her guilt, Suzanne is acquitted on the grounds that the police had used entrapment. She walks free, but Jimmy and Russell are sent to prison and Lydia gets out free for her cooperation. Justice prevails when Suzanne gets her comeuppance—she fabricates a story about Larry’s drug addiction and how he got killed by drug suppliers, who wanted to keep him silent. Larry’s father Joe (Dan Hedaya) then realizes that Suzanne is behind the murder, and he uses his mafia connections to have her murdered. In a stroke of luck and irony, Lydia becomes a celebrity by telling the true story in a TV interview. In the next-to-last sequence, Suzanne is lured away from her home by an old executive from Hollywood pretending to be interested in her career. He turns out to be a hit man, hired by the Marettos to get rid of the monstrous woman. The fact that he is played by director David Cronenberg, best known for his horror films (Scanners, The Fly, Dead Ringers), brings an extra edge to the act. Cronenberg had recently released his controversial adaptation of the presumably unfilmable Naked Lunch, based on the book by Van Sant’s literary and cultural hero William S. Burroughs Jr. (which Van Sant had also wanted to film).
The film’s very last scene may be too literal for a movie that aims to be subtle and cool, but is a tad too starch and obvious. It shows Larry’s sister, Janice (Ileana Douglas), skating on the frozen lake where Suzanne’s corpse was buried by the hit man. There is, however, a visually satisfying coda, in which the image of Lydia, who had achieved the kind of fame Suzanne had yearned for, is split into two images, then into four, and then into numerous ones. (This device had been used in earlier films, such as Sidney Lumet’s 1976 Oscar-winning satire, Network.)
As a send-up of Americans’ media madness and their obsession with becoming a celebrity, To Die For disappointed Van Sant’s devotees, who expected something wilder than yet another spoof of tabloid culture. As Powers observed, “For all its hilarious moments, the picture feels slightly desperate, as if the filmmakers were trying to fatten up a satire that’s not outrageous enough to compete with pictures like Natural Born Killers, let alone the reality of Kato Kaelin, John Wayne Bobbitt, and all those lunatic statues of Michael Jackson.”39
Reflecting his worldview, Van Sant shows sympathy for the alienated working-class teenagers. As usual, he finds something lyrical, authentic, and touching in the forlorn isolation of the pudgy Lydia and the uneducated, impressionable Jimmy. Jimmy explains his reckless love for Suzanne with pop culture references to the zombies in Night of the Living Dead—it is the only real/reel knowledge he possesses. The director suggests that, despite having indifferent parents and teachers and despite being engulfed by a trashy, superficial, and disposable culture, working-class youths still believe in such “old-fashioned” values as love, loyalty, decency, and camaraderie. They possess the capacity for genuine emotions, even if they cannot verbally articulate their feelings.
In her New York Times review, Janet Maslin described To Die For as “an irresistible black comedy and a wicked delight,” adding that “it takes aim at tabloid ethics and hits a solid bull’s-eye, with Ms. Kidman’s teasingly beautiful Suzanne as the most alluring of media-mad monsters. The target is broad, but Gus Van Sant’s film is too expertly sharp and funny for that to matter; instead, it shows off this director’s slyness better than any of his work since Drugstore Cowboy. Both Mr. Van Sant and Ms. Kidman have reinvented themselves miraculously for this occasion, which brings out the best in all concerned.”40
Ultimately, To Die For is not that smart as a black satire of America’s fatal obsession with TV and the dangerously growing culture of fame. The movie lagged behind the zeitgeist: Waters satirized this issue in his 1970s comedies (see chapter 5), and Scorsese’s King of Comedy in 1983 and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers in 1994 tackled in darker and wittier ways the obsession with fame and the cost of its relentless pursuit. Despite critical acclaim, the movie was not particularly commercial, considering its sizable budget and the hype before its release, grossing only $20 million at the box office.
In 1997, for the first time in his career, Van Sant gained mainstream acceptance with Good Will Hunting, a tale of a troubled, blue-collar mathematical genius. It was cowritten by and starring two bright but unknown actors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who had known each other since childhood and were soon to become major Hollywood players and national celebrities. A huge critical and commercial success, grossing $220 million worldwide, the film received seven Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director nomination for Van Sant. The movie won the Best Screenplay Oscar for Damon and Affleck and the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Robin Williams. (Later on, Van Sant, Damon, and Affleck parodied themselves and the film in Kevin Smith’s rude comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.)
Centering on a working-class youth who’s forced to come to terms with his creative genius and tormented inner feelings, this film is emotionally involving and sporadically quite touching. Fans of Van Sant’s earlier offbeat films were disappointed by the more conventional attributes of Good Will Hunting, a “problem” drama dealing with the complex relationship between a rough, extraordinarily gifted kid and his troubled, equally bruised therapist. However, Damon’s towering performance in the lead and a superlative ensemble headed by Robin Williams elevate this engaging psychodrama above its middlebrow, therapeutic sensibility.
Thematically, the film recalls Robert Redford’s 1980 Ordinary People and especially Jodie Foster’s 1991 Little Man Tate, which also revolves around a child-genius of the working class. Younger viewers embraced Van Sant’s film in the same way that a previous generation had related to Mike Nichols’s The Graduate in 1967. Though they were both zeigeist pictures touching a chord with younger demographics, there is a major difference between them: Good Will Hunting was written from the inside by twentysomething guys, unlike The Graduate, which was made by older filmmakers: writer Buck Henry, director Nichols, and star Dustin Hoffman, who looked younger but was thirty when he played college graduate Benjamin Braddock. It’s a testament to Van Sant’s idiosyncratic talent that he endows the narrative with the nihilistic humor and deceptively casual and nonchalant style that have marked Drugstore Cowboy, which was also straightforward, and My Own Private Idaho, which was not.41
The film centers on Will Hunting, a twenty-year-old working as a janitor at MIT and spending most of his free time with his coarse friends at the neighborhood bar. Blessed with the grace of genius, Will, who does not attend college, can summon obscure historical references based on his exceptional photographic memory. He can solve difficult mathematical problems with ease, which makes MIT’s richer, more educated students envious of him.
When Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård of Breaking the Waves) presents a math challenge to his graduate students, with a fine reward to match, Will anonymously solves the problem on the blackboard in the school’s corridors. Lambeau begins searching for the mysterious student, and upon finding Will, he takes him under his wing. It’s the only way for Will to get parole after several run-ins with the law and the courts. However, Lambeau sets two conditions. First, Will must meet with him once a week for a math session, and, second, Will must begin therapy.
A succession of psychologists try to reach Will, using various techniques (including hypnosis) but to no avail—he won’t cooperate. Finally, Lambeau summons his old classmate Sean McGuire (Williams), now a community college instructor and therapist, and the real drama begins. In essence, the script is structured as a battle of wills. Four individuals are vying for Will’s soul: a mathematician; a therapist; an affluent British student named Skylar (Minnie Driver), who has a crush on him; and his neighborhood buddy Chuckie (Affleck). Each of the four represents a distinct point of view, but all are presumably trying to help Will find his true self.
Most of the narrative consists of intense one-on-one sessions between Will and Sean, two equally stubborn, equally damaged men. True to form, psychological revelations and emotional disclosures are made about their respective pasts. An orphan who was abused by his surrogate father, Will has carried a chip on his shoulder ever since boyhood. For his part, the widower Sean is still in love with his wife, who had painfully died of cancer. A tough Irishman on the surface, Sean, also a product of an abusive parent, is quite vulnerable. These parallels are, in fact, a major weakness of the script, which increasingly gets too schematic: At the end, every personal problem and turbulent interaction is neatly resolved. Van Sant must have realized that the story is too predictable, as he imbues the film with his customary devious style that’s grainy and arty at the same time. And, ultimately, the tale offers strong emotional, if conventional, payoffs.
Again, Van Sant showed that he is one of the few American directors who really understands—and doesn’t condescend to—working-class and blue-collar America. Here he gets deep into his characters, resulting in a beautifully textured movie about outcasts (Van Sant’s favorite topic), which is seldom seen in mainstream Hollywood. Rich in tone, Good Will Hunting is by turn funny, nonchalant, moving, and angry, effortlessly alternating moods between scenes and often within the same scene.
Endowed with the good looks of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio (whom he physically resembled at the time) and blessed with impressive discipline and technical skills to match, Damon gives a charismatic performance in a demanding role that catapulted him to international stardom. Perfectly cast, he makes the aching, step-by-step transformation of Will’s psyche and soul both realistic and credible. As for Williams, comparisons were inevitably made between his Oscar-nominated role in Awakenings (in which he played a shy doctor) and his work in Good Will Hunting, which in my view is stronger, subtler, and more satisfying.
After a couple of disappointing assignments (Allison Anders’s Grace of My Heart and Harmony Korine’s Gummo), the cult French cinematographer Yves Escoffier shows his brilliant lyrical style, opting for natural light whenever possible and fully integrating South Boston as one of the story’s characters. Longtime Van Sant collaborators Missy Stewart and Beatrix Aruna Pasztor also make significant contributions with their detailed production design, which illustrates the uneasy coexistence of disparate social classes in America.
Good Will Hunting afforded Van Sant the opportunity to remake Alfred Hitchcock’s best-known film, the 1960 classic Psycho. The director opted to recreate the film (almost) shot for shot, but in color, with a cast of young Hollywood talents. Unfortunately, they are all miscast: Anne Heche in the famous Janet Leigh role of Marion Crane; Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins in the original; and Julianne Moore as Marion’s sister Lila. Moreover, the few deviations from Hitchcock are pointless: Van Sant made the first scene, in the Phoenix hotel, more sexually explicit, and Sam (played by Viggo Mortensen) is walking around the room naked (shot from behind). To adjust for inflation, the amount of money that Marion steals is $400,000, instead of the $40,000 in the original. Worse yet, the famous murder montage in the Bates Motel is interrupted for no apparent reason with a brief exterior shot of the clouded sky (a visual motif in Van Sant’s work).
Van Sant might have misunderstood the nature of Hitchcock’s classic, for one of the few new elements is the very last shot, which took the viewers out of the motel onto the highway, in a sharp deviation from Hitchcock’s intent to submerge viewers deep down in the slimy mud where Marion is buried in her car. Significantly, the last image of Hitchcock’s Psycho was a shot of a chain that pulls the car (and the money inside it) out of the swamp.
From the start, Van Sant’s decision to remake Psycho was met with skepticism, and when the film was released, in the summer of 1998, it met with derision from both critics and industry insiders. As expected, Psycho was perceived as a pointless and risible remake whose artistic and commercial failure surprised no one, winning Van Sant the Razzie Award for the year’s Worst Director. Perhaps the only “good” thing that came out of this inane effort was Van Sant’s awareness of his strengths and weaknesses: “I learned a lot about myself as a filmmaker. The images and the things in my films tend to be sentimental, and Hitchcock is not about that. He’s about suspense and austerity and separating everybody, and I’m about including everybody.”42
However, the Psycho debacle didn’t derail the director, who was soon busy with new projects. In addition to directing, he devoted considerable energy to releasing two albums. He also published a well-received novel, Pink, which was a thinly veiled chronicle of his deep grief over River Phoenix’s death on October 31, 1993.
Van Sant fared slightly better with his next studio feature, Finding Forrester, a drama about a high school student from the Bronx (Rob Brown) who befriends a crusty, reclusive author (Sean Connery). Critical response was mixed to positive, singling out the director’s skill at melding the performance styles of first-time actor Brown and Hollywood legend Connery (still best known as the most iconic and popular James Bond). The script was seen by some critics as a schematic combination of Scent of a Woman (1992), costarring Al Pacino as an older, blind military veteran and Chris O’Donnell as his young assistant-protégé, and Van Sant’s own Good Will Hunting, which also concerns the relationship between a mature professional and a young, irresponsible boy.
Even so, for a Hollywood movie, the acts of reading and writing are portrayed in such gratifying ways that they made viewers want to read a real book rather than an “airport” best seller. Moreover, the interracial mentor-pupil relationship is presented as mutually rewarding, and the interracial teenage romance is depicted without punitive condescension or parental dissent. The film’s title is admittedly too literal and didactic, but Finding Forrester is deftly crafted, providing, above all, a platform for Connery to deliver a riveting performance as the solitary and charismatic literary legend.
Finding Forrester highlights the auteur’s most recurrent motifs, the moral odyssey of outcasts and the casual randomness of urban life. From the beginning of his oeuvre he has shown fondness for outsiders, such as the characters of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. The director was known for depicting outcasts in a humanistic way by throwing them into a crisis mode, which forces them to confront the mores of their subculture as well as those of the society at large.
Telling a story that’s similar to Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester has Connery playing the Robin Williams part and black teenager Brown the Matt Damon role, a gifted kid with a chip on his shoulder. However, if Good Will Hunting idealizes a mathematical genius who’s superior to Harvard and MIT students, Finding Forrester is critical of conservative education and tyrant instructors, but it doesn’t put down the system as a whole.
With a touch of Rear Window voyeurism, the narrative introduces Forrester, a silver-haired eccentric spending a lot of time by his window, seemingly observing black kids playing ball on a court across the street; it turns out that he’s an avid bird-watcher. Veiled in mystery, Forrester was last heard from forty years ago, when he was a brilliant Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist whose book became a classic. That book appears to be the only literary output for which he can claim credit. As the youngsters are aware of Forrester’s invisible presence, their curiosity naturally builds up. Sneaking into Forrester’s apartment to get information about the mythical man, Jamal (Brown), a brash sixteen-year-old from South Bronx, accidentally leaves behind a backpack full of writings. The next day the bag appears at the window, forcing Jamal to collect it. To the boy’s surprise, his papers have been thoroughly read and graded by Forrester, with a red pen.
A peculiar, unlikely relationship evolves, marked by all the ups and downs of such bonds. When Jamal is recruited by an elite Manhattan prep school for his brilliance on and off the basketball court, he needs help. Though at first hesitant and cynical, Forrester consents and hence becomes a reluctant hero. Gradually, Jamal becomes committed not only to realizing his own literary aspirations but also to cracking down the veneer of Forrester’s sheltered existence. The film chronicles the flowering of a union that goes beyond the routine teacher-pupil interaction. Although authority lines are clearly maintained, Mike Rich’s script shows how dependent the mentor becomes on the kid, who evolves from an intrigued fan to a loyal student to a social companion, determined to expose Forrester to the world and reignite his passion for literature and, by extension, life.
Unlike most Hollywood school sagas about outcast students, including Sidney Poitier’s 1967 vehicle, To Sir with Love, in this film both parties get something substantial in return that they otherwise would not have gotten. Though earnest and predictable, the tale avoids the traps of the similarly themed Educating Rita, in which a married working-class hairdresser (Julie Walters) forces a boozy professor (Michael Caine) to become her instructor. Unlike Educating Rita, Finding Forrester doesn’t unfold as a series of calculated setups painted with a broad brush, and there are no cute scenes, such as the one in which Rita gives her mentor a shampoo and haircut. Scribe Rich inserts narrative subtleties and moral shadings into a friendship that ultimately becomes a surrogate family relationship. Throughout, Van Sant goes out of his way not to suggest any sexual innuendos or erotic tension between the protagonists, who are more like surrogate father and son. This is evident in the mise-en-scène, especially when the two are in the same frame but never stand too close to each other or look closely at each other when they communicate.43
But the text is too old-fashioned for Van Sant’s postmodernist sensibility and idiosyncratic vision. A crucial scene at school, in which Jamal is reprimanded for his conduct, functions as the equivalent of a courtroom scene, where bad and inflexible teachers are contrasted with good and charismatic ones. F. Murray Abraham almost reprises his Oscar-winning role as Salieri, a composer jealous of and inferior to Mozart in Amadeus. Here he plays an insecure writer-artist, Professor Robert Crawford, Forrester’s jealous nemesis, who serves as an obvious catalyst to the predictable conflicts and ultimate face-to-face confrontation with Forrester, which is staged like an anticipated shootout in a classic Western.
The film’s weakest parts deal with Jamal’s friendships with cohorts of his age—specifically with Claire Spence, a rich, white classmate at the private school he attends (played by Anna Paquin, in one of her first adult roles after winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Piano). Neither Rich nor Van Sant seems interested in her character or in the bond between her and Jamal, resulting in brief, shallow interactional scenes based on the exchange of looks, smiles, and derivative dialogue. A superfluous figure, Claire seems to exist as a plot function—showing that Jamal is a normal adolescent who likes girls—and perhaps as a marketing hook to attract female viewers to what is essentially a male-driven feature.
It’s the acting, no doubt, that binds viewers to the characters’ shifting emotions and escalating tensions, both within and outside themselves. Finding Forrester is a chamber piece for two. More than half of the scenes are set indoors in Forrester’s cluttered, seedy, oversized apartment. Inventively textured by Jane Musky to capture the feel of a capacious pre–World War II residence, the apartment becomes sort of a mythical never-never land. What gives the picture its needed outdoor dimensions are the basketball scenes, set at the Bronx’s Copps Coliseum and dynamically shot by Harris Savides. The modulated editing is by Valdis Oskarsdottir, who had worked on such excellent Dogme 95 films as The Celebration (named the Best Foreign Language Picture of 1998 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association).
Connery expertly fills the bill of an older man who’s both ingratiating and infuriating, a recluse who needs to be rescued from his own misanthropy. The role allows him to display his signature humor, flourish, and arrogance, but also his vulnerable humanity. As an actor, Connery has stopped masking his Scottishness; he now integrates it into his work, hauling his unique accent with grandeur. But the film is by no means a one-man show: though lacking previous experience, Brown stands up to Connery and in some scenes matches him with inner strength and remarkable stillness.
BACK TO INDIE AND ART-HOUSE CINEMA
After reaching the nadir of his career with the pointless remake of Psycho, followed by mainstream Hollywood fare, Finding Forrester, an old-fashioned star vehicle for Sean Connery, which made no demands on viewers, Van Sant took a radical turn. Going back to his independent roots, he began a new career phase that would last about eight years. The first result was Gerry, a visually compelling but thematically flawed road movie that vaguely recalls his distinctive work.
In its rigorous artistry, Gerry is an austere and minimalist film, displaying some awesome visuals and transcendent sounds. The film represents a reunion for Van Sant with Matt Damon after their fruitful collaboration on Good Will Hunting, and it offers a good role for the then young and inexperienced Casey Affleck (Ben’s younger brother). Marked by sparse and sporadic dialogue, the narrative is slight even by the standards of experimental indies. Gerry received its world premiere at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and traveled the global festival circuit before getting limited theatrical release a whole year later. Semiacademic, the film was embraced by scholars and fringe audiences seeking nontraditional fare.
Pushing fifty and at a midpoint of his career, the ever-unpredictable Van Sant made a film that at once signals and benefits from what might have been an artistic crisis, indicating a need to revitalize his creative juices. Having gone the commercial route, he decided to make a radical departure with a film that’s as innovative as his first works, albeit in different ways. The central premise, which is replete with symbolic meanings, is rather simple. Two youngsters, both named Gerry (Damon and Affleck), go on a hike in a far remote desert (the film was mostly shot in Death Valley, California). The journey puts to the test their camaraderie and ultimately their very existence. The trip forces them to come to terms with Nature’s brutality and their survival instincts due to the lack of food, shelter, and water.
It takes time before any verbal communication occurs, a minimalism that continues throughout the picture, forcing viewers to speculate about the protagonists as their trip goes awry, before reaching its tragic but logical denouement. In the first long tracking shot, the camera follows a car from behind as it rides on an isolated road. It then switches angles and presents the couple’s faces. Violating rules of classic narrative cinema, Van Sant deliberately avoids providing clues as to who the characters are or what their backgrounds and motivations are. Though there was a blueprint of a screenplay, credited to Van Sant and his actors, Gerry feels improvised. For the most part, it rings true in the sense of what the Gerrys talk about on the rare occasions that they choose to interact. They express concerns with dehydration, which escalates rapidly, and fear of getting lost in the wilderness, as there are no traces of the highway or memories of the spot where they had left their car.
Despite the strong presence of Damon and Affleck, Gerry is an auteurist film that deploys rich syntax. The film relies on an ever-changing point of view and a mixture of long and static takes and medium-range shots. Van Sant effectively manipulates cinema’s most distinctive dimensions, physical space and temporal time. Discerning viewers should be able to notice the specific angles from which the Gerrys and the vistas are presented. Most impressive is the director’s stubborn refusal to grant his actors close-ups, which is a common Hollywood device to elicit emotional identification and display the stars’ screen presence. One can count on one hand the number of close-ups in Gerry, most of which appear toward the end of the journey, though there is not a single mega close-up.
The variable elements in Gerry are the landscape and the positioning of the characters, singly and jointly, against it. Although the changing landscape, presented at different times of the day and night, enriches the film visually, it also presents problems; about one third of the movie was shot in Argentina, but due to worsening climate conditions, Van Sant was forced to move to California’s Death Valley for the rest of the shoot.
The other noticeable variable is the shifting tone, which gets progressively darker and more somber. The film’s second reel is the most entertaining due to its eccentric humor. In a revelatory shot, Affleck is atop an isolated cliff, whereas Damon is placed below him on the ground waiting for him to jump off. In these segments, Gerry recalls the works of the silent clowns, such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the comedies by French auteur Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle). In its resonant moments, Gerry is a stark existential fable in the tradition of Samuel Beckett’s plays—specifically, Waiting for Godot. Like Beckett’s (anti)heroes, the Gerrys are sort of ordinary clowns seeking meaning for their routine existence while utterly lost—literally and figuratively—in the wilderness.
Early on in his career, Van Sant’s work was compared to that of Jean Genet, the French enfant terrible. Both thematically and philosophically, Gerry fits into the oeuvre of Van Sant, who has devoted his career to the odysseys of misfits and outcasts, exploring the bizarre and random nature of their lives. Gerry is not as lyrical or fanciful as My Own Private Idaho, the director’s masterpiece, but like that 1991 indie, it centers on the changing relationship between two “deviant” personalities.
Visually, Gerry pays homage to such seminal figures as Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, Belgian experimental director Chantal Akerman, and celebrated Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami (whose Taste of Cherry cowon the 1997 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or). The film was also influenced by Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos (Landscape in the Mist, Eternity and a Day), whose films are odysseys into the countryside of bleak Greek existence, shaped and burdened by the past.44 Gerry recalls Angelopoulos’s work—it is necessarily languid and defined by its elaborate mise-en-scènes, shot duration, image composition, and so on. The shifts in perspective, the journey’s progress or lack of it (depending on how you look at it), and the movement result in a movie that serves as a metaphor for understanding one’s self as well as others.
Though favoring alterable camera movement and long takes, Gerry differs from Angelopoulos’s work in its acting style. The performances add a distinctly American flavor to a feature that aspires to be a European art film. Van Sant’s actors are not as studied as those of the Greek director, and their line readings are not as Bressonian in their lack of inflection (referring to French director Robert Bresson). In its controlled artistry and Brechtian distancing, Gerry avoids facile emotionalism. The film is handled with tactful obliqueness that reflects Van Sant’s inherent humanity. As shown in Drugstore Cowboy and other films, he never remains too far outside of the spectacle to cut to the heart of the drama.
Gerry displays some beautifully realized images by the brilliant cinematographer Harris Savides, who would shoot several of Van Sant’s pictures. In one mesmerizing sequence, the camera tracks the Gerrys as they walk toward the horizon. The sequence is set at that crucial moment when darkness turns into dawn and the rising sun assumes its place in the universe with its gradually blinding light. In this and other moments, Gerry is personal and poetic in ways that few American indies are.
Van Sant’s wish to explore minimalism in narrative strategy, visual style, and the whole filmmaking process itself (working with small crews and casts) led to three other quintessentially independent films, which expressed his unique vision, albeit at the price of failing to reach appreciative audiences.
It took Gerry over a year to make it to theaters, during which time Van Sant began production on his next film, the controversial Elephant. He was approached by HBO and actress Diane Keaton (serving as producer) to make a fictional film based on the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Challenged by the idea, he chose to shoot the feature in his hometown, casting untrained teen actors for a chronicle about an “ordinary” high school day that is suddenly hit by unexpected mayhem and tragedy.
The film’s title derives from a 1989 BBC short feature of the same name, directed by Alan Clarke. The expression “There’s an elephant in the room” refers to a collective denial of a grave problem, which fits the theme of many Van Sant’s films. Dealing with fanatical political violence in Northern Ireland, Clarke’s Elephant relies on a minimalist visual style, which has also inspired Van Sant.
Set in the fictional Watt High School in a Portland suburb, the tale chronicles the events surrounding a senseless shooting. Going into the film, Van Sant anticipated controversy; as he told the Los Angeles Times: “An event like the Columbine school shooting is so grotesque that the taste level of doing a dramatic piece is brought into question, because of the way we think of drama itself. We think of it as entertainment, but I’ve never really thought of it as strictly entertainment.”45 The factual tragic incident was still fresh, what with the extensive coverage by the media, which reported the attack in grisly graphic detail. The shooters’ faces then appeared on the cover of Time magazine. And, of course, Michael Moore’s 2002 Oscar-winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine, includes surveillance footage of the shooting from within the high school.
Elephant provoked strong reactions from critics, who either embraced or rejected Van Sant’s decision not to offer any rationale for the characters’ homicidal tendencies. The consensus from the Jury of the Cannes Film Festival was unanimous, however, and in a surprise decision, it awarded Elephant the top prize, the Palme d’Or, and Van Sant the Best Director kudo. The U.S. premiere of Elephant was a fund-raiser for Outside In, an organization aimed at helping youth living on the streets of Portland.
Van Sant returned to the low-key style of his early independent efforts with this semi-improvised exploration of how violence infiltrates a typical American high school. Eric (Eric Deulen) and Alex (Alex Frost), close friends and students in a middle-class suburb of Portland, look ordinary, but they are truly misfits. They are placed at the periphery of the clique-oriented. Little about their behavior draws attention to itself, at least not during this “typical” day. In their leisure, the boys show fascination with Nazi iconography, enjoy violent video games, and explore homoerotic desires like quick masturbatory sex in the shower, which is implied but not shown.
A long tracking shot reveals Mr. McFarland (Timothy Bottoms) driving erratically to drop off his son, John (John Robinson), at school. John realizes that his father is drunk and instructs him to move to the passenger’s seat. We immediately get the idea that the adult world, represented by Mr. McFarland, is not to be trusted. The camera then follows the students as they walk back and forth down the hallways, talk to their friends, and go indifferently to their classes, which don’t hold any special interest for them.
The film melds long and elegant takes, like those that marked Gerry, with Harris Savides reprising his famously fluid camera work. The pupils are shown in captivating tracking shots that position and dwarf them against the broader setting. Alex and Eric are routinely being bullied by the school’s jocks. During a science class, one pupil diverts a teacher and then throws a spitball at Alex. Later Alex and Eric order weapons from a website and receive their rifles by mail. They plan an armed ambush of their school by drawing up diagrams, formulating a precise attack strategy with graphic charts of the school’s sites, including the library and lunchroom. At home, while Alex is taking a shower, Eric gets in with him. Eric claims that he has never kissed anyone before, and the two kiss, which is seen vaguely through the glass door.
The next day Alex and Eric make their way to school as if it was just another day. Upon arrival, they encounter their classmate John and tell him to leave because “heavy shit is about to go down.” Bright and alert, John realizes instinctively what is about to happen, and he tries to warn others not to enter the school—but to little effect. No one believes him—after all, it’s yet another uneventful day at school, where nothing much ever happens. The two gunmen then invade the premises. When their initial plan to blow up the school with propane bombs fails, they begin shooting randomly and indiscriminately. A student named Elias (Elias McConnell) photographs them entering the library, where they open fire, shooting several innocent students. Realizing that the gunfire is for real, the students begin to panic while their teachers attempt an evacuation. The two boys then separate as they continue their killing spree.
Mr. Luce, cornered in the hallway, begs Eric to talk to him, but Eric yells, “I ain’t putting shit down!” and fires at him. Eric warns the school principal to stop bullying his pupils, and seconds later he guns him down coldly. Alex then enters the cafeteria and strikes up a brief conversation with Eric, which ends abruptly when Alex shoots his chum, showing no emotion. When he discovers Carrie and Nathan in a freezer, he recites, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” in order to decide which to kill first.
Elephant concludes as it begins, with a shot of cloudy blue skies, signaling ambiguous meanings—the start of either a bright new day or a day that might turn dark and ominous. Clouds in their various colors, formations, and movements are a staple in Van Sant’s work, dating all the way back to Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho.
Made with a small budget of $3 million, Elephant was a commercial failure domestically, grossing only $1.3 million at the box office. However, it was more popular in foreign countries, which accounted to for most of its global take of $10 million, thus recouping the expense and even turning some profit for HBO. (In general, Van Sant’s work is more appreciated in Europe—specifically, France and the United Kingdom—than in the United States.)
Elephant could be described as the first component of a trilogy—what Van Sant refers to as his Death Trilogy—which also includes Last Days and Paranoid Park. All three are personal chronicles of lost contemporary American lives that end tragically, and all were shown in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival.
Last Days, Van Sant’s fictional meditation on the turmoil that engulfs a brilliant but troubled musician, was inspired by the late Kurt Cobain, to whom the film is dedicated. Like the director’s former films, Last Days is an ultramodest effort, made on a limited budget with a cast and crew that were small even by indie standards. “He keeps his crews small and flexible,” cinematographer Savides told me. “He doesn’t want too much … to get in the way of the film.”46 Not as visually arresting or formally elegant as the previous pictures, however, Last Days also lacks the political urgency of Elephant, which, after all, dealt with violence in American high schools, a more significant social problem.
One doesn’t have to be an auteurist critic to detect thematic continuities in Van Sant’s films. For starters, dealing with death, all of these features are bleak reflections on troubled youths that do not fulfill their potential due to untimely deaths. The causes of their deaths, however, differ: in Elephant, it’s random and arbitrary, whereas in Gerry it’s calculated and planned.
The extremely photogenic Michael Pitt (who previously had appeared in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers in 2003 and in the original musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2001) plays Blake, the introspective artist-musician who is on the verge of collapse under the burdens of fame, professional obligations, and growing isolation. Last Days is Van Sant’s speculation on Blake’s last hours, spent in and around his wooded cabin. Blake, probably named after poet William Blake, seems to be a prisoner in his own home, a fugitive from his own life. The narrative, which spans two days, is meant to represent random moments in the life of Blake, whose fractured consciousness is expressed by a tormented and inarticulate mind.
Most of the story takes place outdoors, in the woods or by the lake, where Blake is seen wandering at the beginning and the end of the film. The film is based on what may be one of Van Sant’s thinner screenplays (basically a treatment). For long stretches of time, there is no dialogue or sound. Blake’s incoherent rambling and wandering in and out of the house are fused with or interrupted by spontaneous bursts of rock and roll, the kind of music that Blake/Cobain had composed and performed. Leslie Shatz’s sound design for this film is truly remarkable, surrounding Blake with a wash of foreign noise, as if he is “never quite present in the real world around him.”47
Last Days exhibits stylistic devices that are prevalent in many Van Sant films. Steering clear of mainstream cinema, the director continues to experiment with very short scenes and elliptic storytelling. Viewers are asked to be patient—it takes a long time for the layered images and nuanced sounds to form a coherent landscape. As writer and director, Van Sant opts for the kind of ambiguity that had characterized Gerry and Elephant. Further, all three films are inspired by current newspapers stories. Gerry grew out of a news item about two young men who got lost in the desert. Elephant offered a look at the wave of school shootings like Columbine in the 1990s. Last Days was made after the controversial death of Cobain, an event that received extensive media attention and prompted the making of a documentary.
Unlike Elephant, though, in this picture, Van Sant doesn’t use multiple angles and POVs to describe crucial events of the story. In a Cannes Film Festival interview, the director allowed that he didn’t have much information about his subject. Nor did he conduct any research about Cobain’s actual life. “I felt more comfortable just making it all up,” he said. “I wasn’t really covering much time; the story was always limited to two days.”48 Van Sant believes that, no matter what the subject matter, “you can never really get the truth, so you might as well have an analogy rather than a biographical depiction.”49
Cobain (born in 1967) left Aberdeen, Washington, for Olympia in 1986, where he formed the band Nirvana. Nirvana became very popular, and in 1991, the band signed a contract with Geffen Records; the group’s album Nevermind made it one of the most successful bands in the world. In 1992, Cobain married Courtney Love, who was already pregnant with his child. In 1993, Nirvana released its next album, In Utero, which topped the charts. On March 4, 1994, Cobain was taken to the hospital in a coma. It was officially reported as an accident, but many believed it was a suicide attempt. Family and friends convinced him to seek rehab, but he fled rehab after several days. On April 8, his body was found in his Seattle home, holding a shotgun that had been fired into his head. A note, written in red ink, was addressed to his wife and to his daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. Two days after his body was discovered, people gathered in Seattle, setting fires, chanting profanities, and fighting with the police.
Despite its factual source, Last Days doesn’t aspire to pass as a docudrama or investigative report into Cobain’s death. Instead, the film uses his death as a point of departure to tell a story with a personal angle.50 Van Sant benefits from the fact that not much is known about Cobain’s demise, allowing the director to rely on his subjective imagination and loosely linked associations. As in Elephant, he does not offer psychological explanation of the why and how Cobain died. Nor does he try to illuminate Cobain’s troubled mind. His inspiration derives not from the event but from Cobain’s death as a huge mass-media event.
Made for the festival circuit, Last Days was an art film of limited scope, even less commercial than Elephant. It’s an exercise in pure cinema—a sensory experience—based on Van Sant’s multilayered structure of images and sounds. But there’s no question Last Days is a personal film for the director: Cobain died in April 1994, only six months after the death of River Phoenix (in October 1993), Van Sant’s friend and favored actor at the time, with whom he planned to make more movies.
Paranoid Park, the most technically accomplished film in the youth series that began with Elephant in 2003 and continued with Last Days in 2005 showed Van Sant in top artistic shape. Style and form coalesce in such a smooth and fluent way that the film stands as a summation of Van Sant’s directorial powers, a climactic return to his indie roots. The film’s budget was relatively low ($3 million, just like that of the former indies), based on Van Sant’s having perfected a quick and efficient production mode. Considering its level of technical polish, it’s worth noting that the shoot lasted only eighteen days. Nevertheless, the audience for this kind of art film was clearly very limited.
If Paranoid Park is the most successful effort in the series, it’s perhaps a result of the source material, a novel by Portland writer Blake Nelson that Van Sant adapted freely into a workable screenplay. The title describes a homemade facility, a site frequented by committed practitioners of skateboarding. For some critics, the problem with Elephant was its close association with the actual Columbine catastrophe, and the same can be said about Last Days, his pseudobiopic of music phenomenon Kurt Cobain. Free of those external political associations, Paranoid Park operates on its own terms as a one-of-a-kind experience.
Nominally, Paranoid Park recalls such American classics as Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, and Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge. Like Ray’s film, Paranoid Park centers on a confused high schooler, again named Alex (Gabe Nevins). An amoral (rather than immoral) teenager in desperate need of guidance, he doesn’t get any useful support from his parents or teachers. And like Hunter’s indie, Paranoid Park involves a fatal accident (and a dead body), focusing on the moral dilemma of how to deal with the corpse—specifically, whether or not to inform the police.
To lend the enterprise greater authenticity, Van Sant recruited his cast members on the Internet, using MySpace.com. Like his previous two films, Paranoid Park is not about subtle acting or compelling performances. It doesn’t much matter that most of its actors are nonexpressive because they are largely used as tools in the director’s broader and more elaborate scheme. Nonlinear and lacking real drama or melodrama, Paranoid Park unfolds out of order, beginning in the middle of the story, then going forward, and finally going backward. Midway, when Van Sant discloses details about Alex’s role in the accidental death of a security guard, we realize that the film is not about the dead man but about a teenager who lives in a moral limbo, a state of confusion and anomie with no role models or even people to talk to.
Since Van Sant is not an amateur psychologist or charlatan sociologist, he is not interested in explaining Alex’s conduct. But he is a good filmmaker who understands how color, movement, and rhythm can convey a subjective and distorted state of mind more precisely, vividly, and beautifully than scenes of long monologues or dialogues. As writer and director, he doesn’t pretend to understand his protagonists, and he refuses to judge them; his main concern is to capture visually the texture of their lifestyle. To that end, he conveys visually and emotionally the existence of teenagers who find catharsis only when they skateboard in a park, even though they are not members of any organized community.
There’s a wonderful scene in which detective Richard Lu (Dan Liu) visits the local high school and talks to its students. Lu claims that he wants to understand them as group members, but the very notions of group and collective behavior are foreign to them. This school scene recalls To Die For, in which Suzanne Stone goes to school with her camera, trying to involve the indifferent students, albeit in a self-serving project that, ironically, would prove to be her own undoing.
Unlike Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown (and other similarly themed features), Paranoid Park is not really about the subculture of skateboarding. Van Sant is using this sport as a backdrop and a metaphor. Skateboarding is a solitary activity, but it’s always more fun to practice when one is surrounded by others, even if there is no verbal communication or real physical interaction.
A quintessential Van Santian (anti)hero, Alex is a handsome, long-haired adolescent, a product of a broken family; his parents are separated but not divorced yet. Alex is both the protagonist and the narrator. The tale is punctuated by minimal voice-over narration, and it’s illustrated by shots of Alex writing a journal, which always begins with the words “Paranoid Park,” and often takes place outdoors.
Though the tale starts with a murder mystery when the body of a security guard is found (he was run over in the rail yards, and the police think there was foul play), Van Sant is not treating it as a mystery or a puzzle. Midway, he recreates the tragic night in which Alex inadvertently caused the guard’s death while riding on the train with his buddy Jared (Jake Miller). The director is more interested in how Alex interacts—or doesn’t interact—with his mates and parents and in how he deals—or doesn’t deal—with the aftermath of the murder and his feelings of guilt and responsibility. Alex’s interaction with the other boys is minimal, and he is more of a skateboarding voyeur than an enthusiastic participant, highly aware of his technical deficiencies.
There are only two women in Alex’s life: Jennifer (Taylor Momsen), his current girlfriend, and Macy (Lauren McKinney), a girl who follows him around. Both women are more aggressive than Alex, which is no big deal, considering how passive and apathetic he is.
Van Sant shows only one sex scene, again indicating that as a director he is uncomfortable—too shy and self-conscious—with sexuality. As usual, he relegates the sex lives of his characters to a secondary, peripheral level. In this film, the sexual act, just like in To Die For, is initiated by a woman, though here she’s a virgin. The sex itself is extremely brief, as if to suggest that the act itself is irrelevant, just one more thing to do, with no joy or impact. Right after sex, the girl, just like the boys in Kids, calls her mates to tell them how fabulous it was, though there’s no evidence of her pleasure. The director spends more time depicting Alex in the shower, but in a nonvoyeuristic manner, than showing the boy engaged in other activities. The shower scene, with its décor and sounds, inevitably contains references to Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds, not to mention Van Sant’s own shower scene in Elephant.
Enamored of his screen youths, Van Sant takes their POV, encouraging viewers to empathize with them. This is clear in the few interactions Alex has with his parents. In one scene, his mother is first heard—reproaching, of course—but not seen. And when she is seen, it’s from a distance as a faceless figure. She’s an ineffective parent with no influence on him. Alex’s father is just as vague and ineffective as his mom. He appears in just one scene, in which he mumbles about not wanting to hurt Alex before explaining in a rather vague way that the divorce is difficult because “it’s not easy to deal with your mother.”
Working for the first time with ace cinematographer Chris Doyle, best known for his celebrated collaboration with cult director Wong Kar-Wai, Van Sant shot his film in both Super 8 and 35mm. The Super 8 footage, done by Rain Kathy Li, is particularly effective in conveying the fast-flying, nearly surreal images of skateboarding. As in previous films, other sequences are presented in slow-motion. To portray the routinized activities, the director favors repetition of images, here evident in showing Alex pacing the school’s long hallways (scenes that are prevalent in Elephant) or walking in green fields toward the water.
Considering its running time (85 minutes), Paranoid Park boasts one of the densest and richest soundtracks of a Van Sant picture, courtesy of sound designer Leslie Shatz, who created forceful soundscapes orchestrated by Ethan Rose. The director deploys those buoyant scores as counterpoint to a rather somber text. But the music is so powerful that it’s overwhelming, often drowning the slender scenario, calling too much attention to itself. One element of the score that’s baffling and disturbing is the extensive and arbitrary use of music composed by Nino Rota, Fellini’s brilliant composer who contributed immeasurably to the overall impact of La Dolce Vita and 8½.
At this juncture of his career, it was clear to Van Sant that he could not just go on making movies with no solid audience or commercial appeal. It is a known fact in Hollywood that youth-oriented pictures become cult films only when they contain sympathetic characters and are fully embraced by young viewers. But American youngsters were not interested in seeing Paranoid Park, Elephant, or Last Days. In the first decade of the new millennium, the director was dangerously making esoteric art films for a coterie of fans interested in indie and experimental cinema. Aware of the limitations of his strategies, he admitted that “this is the end of a certain way I was making films.”51 And, indeed, the timing was therefore right for a more commercial film in the vein of Good Will Hunting.
MAINSTREAMING GAY LIVES
Milk, made in 2008, represented Van Sant’s most accessible film in a decade. After making four personal indies—Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park—which didn’t go much beyond the festival circuit, he again showed that he could direct films with broader appeal about politically relevant themes. Playing Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politico elected to office, Sean Penn rendered such a sympathetic performance that he elevated Van Sant’s biopic way above its conventional structure.
As written by Dustin Lance Black, Milk tries to present a well-rounded, multifaceted portrait of Milk as a gay rights activist, expansive politician, devoted friend, flamboyant lover, and loyal San Francisco resident. The end result is an enjoyable but middle-of-the-road picture that falls short of fulfilling its goals. In other words, Milk is a good film but decidedly not great. Penn received a second Best Actor Oscar for what was his strongest work since his 2003 Oscar-winning turn in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River.
Black’s narrative assumes the shape of a survey of 1970s gay life in San Francisco, just before another major tragedy, the AIDS epidemic. The saga is punctuated by major events, which are indicated on screen with title cards. Although parts of the film are emotionally effective, they don’t add up to a truly satisfying, fully fleshed out portrait of the man who became a symbol of the gay movement. Nor does the film convey the tumultuously vibrant sociopolitical times in which he lived. Taking too balanced an approach to its subject, Milk doesn’t dig deep enough into the psychosexual dynamics of its protagonist.
The structural device of Milk tape-recording his thoughts and premonition of death interrupts the flow of a narrative that’s already too episodic. His commentary is too brief (two sentences or so), adding just another, unnecessary layer to the narrative. As a result, the film is not a particularly poignant profile of a seminal persona that went way beyond the rigid norms of his society in forging a new era defined by a more humanistic and liberal agenda. Milk turned out to be too mainstream for militant gay and indie audiences seeking offbeat fare and too outré for middlebrow viewers who like well-made biopics about “noble” heroes. As a result, the movie scored only moderately at the box office, grossing $31 million in the United States.
Van Sant’s main achievement in Milk resides in his refusal to structure it as a formulaic tale of the rise and fall of an outsider who was an underdog par excellence—a proud, openly gay man. Milk’s platform of hope and heroic legacy continue to resonate in today’s politics. The picture bowed in late November 2008, after the presidential elections. Like Oliver Stone’s biopic W (about President George W. Bush), Milk might have registered stronger impact had it been released prior to the party conventions and presidential debates.
Van Sant’s Milk was not the first feature about the person or his era. In 1984, Robert Epstein and Bob Friedman made the Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which prepared the way for other features about AIDS, such as Parting Glances (1986), Longtime Companion (1990), and Poison (1991), to mention just a few significant gay-themed titles. (See chapter 3.)52
The Times of Harvey Milk chronicled the rise to political power and tragic murder of Milk. His story paralleled the story of the modern gay rights movement—specifically, the heady times of the 1970s in San Francisco’s Castro district, the world’s most famous and most organized gay community. That community couldn’t ask for a more potent representative and mobilizing symbol than Milk. Displaying elements of both tragedy and nostalgia for a unique period in gay history, the nonfictional work depicted how Milk, unsuccessful in his first attempts to win a city supervisor seat, eventually was elected after the city restructured its districts. His campaigns were described by former campaign aides, who told of his generosity and insistence on recruiting a diverse staff. The footage showed Milk and his supporters react to his election with both disbelief and unmitigated joy. The tragedy that followed was foreshadowed by Dan White, the fellow San Francisco supervisor who murdered Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978. Despite White’s confession and evidence of intent, he was given a minor sentence of only seven years in prison. As a result, San Francisco’s gay community was catapulted into a state of rage that led to riots at City Hall. The scene of the candlelight march held for Milk after his murder was especially poignant. The Times of Harvey Milk was at once a piece of history and a tribute to a towering figure in the gay movement.
Because the documentary was made decades ago, Van Sant felt there was room for a new, more illuminating feature about this seminal figure. Shrewdly, Van Sant, as well as Epstein and Friedman, decided to focus on the last eight years of Milk’s life, from 1970 to 1978, without dwelling on his childhood and adolescence. Thus, Milk covers the same turf as the 1984 documentary but adds some new characters and relationships. Van Sant and Black show how Milk recruited a diverse aggregate of people, from militant gays to senior citizens to union workers. In the process, he changed the political system and the meaning of a militant battle for human rights. In 1977, when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he became the country’s first openly gay man to be voted into major public office. His triumph was perceived as a victory for specifically gay as well as more general human rights, as he succeeded in forging new coalitions across the political spectrum. Milk became a national hero well before his untimely death.
In a flashback near the beginning of the film, the restless Milk is forty and living in New York City. Looking for a different purpose, he and his lover, Scott Smith (James Franco), relocate to San Francisco, where they establish a small business, Castro Camera, in the heart of a working-class neighborhood. Soon the place becomes a social (and cruising) center for gay people from all over the country.
Milk seems empowered by San Francisco (this was, after all, the sexual liberation in the pre-AIDS era) and by the Castro neighborhood, sort of a mecca for gay Americans and foreigners—and also for straight tourists wishing to get a glimpse of the distinctly gay region. Surprising even himself, he decides to “go into politics,” designating himself as an outspoken agent for radical change and seeking equal rights and opportunities for all. His love for the city and passion for its people bring him the support of unlikely demographic groups, young and old, straight and gay, at a time when prejudice and violence against gays were rampant—in spite (or because) of the new sexual freedom begun in the late 1960s and increased in the 1970s—including Anita Bryant’s vicious homophobic campaigns.
With vitalizing support from friends and volunteers, Milk immerses himself in “dirty” city politics. Not neglecting the younger generation, he also mentors street activists like Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch, who starred in Penn’s Into the Wild). Bolstering his likable public persona with humor, Milk begins to act in ways that spoke louder than his gift-of-gab words. Soon he becomes a figure known inside as well as outside his immediate milieu—a local celebrity. (In 1976, while visiting San Francisco for the first time, I, like many other people, stopped at the camera shop, now a tourist landmark, and was introduced to Milk by a friend.)
However, there is a price to be paid for his political commitment. Milk’s persistent determination to integrate himself and his agenda into the city government has damaging effects on his personal life, driving him apart from Scott. In what’s truly an American success story, Milk fails not once but three times to get elected, twice for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and once for the California State Assembly. While making his fourth run for public office, Milk takes a younger Mexican lover, Jack Lira (Diego Luna).
The latest campaign proves a triumph, and Milk is elected supervisor for the newly zoned District 5. He serves San Francisco, lobbying for a citywide ordinance protecting people from discrimination based on their sexual orientation, but also rallies support against a proposed statewide referendum that would have fired gay schoolteachers. Milk realizes that his fight against Proposition 6 represents a pivotal point for the gay rights movement. Thus, his political platform and that of another newly elected supervisor, Dan White (Josh Brolin), increasingly diverge, and their personal destinies tragically converge.
To Van Sant’s credit, White is not vilified as a cartoon-type villain, and Brolin, who continues to impress as an actor (he played the lead in Stone’s biopic W as well as the main character in Joel and Ethan Cohen’s 2007 Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men), plays him as an eccentric politico, driven by his own set of ideas and deeply troubled by a whole set of demons. Some of the most illuminating scenes take place between Milk and White, and it’s surprising to realize how complex their bond is. Milk, for example, was the only politician invited to the christening of White’s son. The film suggests that White’s Catholicism, not to mention his excessive drinking, might have played a critical role in his ferocious animosity toward Milk.
Structurally, the narrative of Milk borrows elements from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and other memoir-based sagas. In the first chapters, set in November 1978, Milk tape-records personal observations, such as “Everything I did in my life was with a clear eye on the gay movement.” That he becomes an assassination target later in the month accords his observation a prophetic, even tragic quality. The film also raises questions of consciousness: Was Milk aware of the potentially dangerous effects of his radical politics?
Of the various lovers that Milk had, the most interesting is the first, Scott Smith, played by Franco as a charming, easy-going fellow. It’s only in his scenes with Scott that we get a glimpse of the “gay” persona of Milk, making love, wearing drag, eating cake in bed, arguing and fighting, using gay witticisms. The weakest sections are those with Luna, as the effeminate Mexican lover, perhaps because his part is underwritten and stereotypical; it’s hard to see what bound the couple together other than sex (which is not shown). Like most of Van Sant’s films, this tale is largely male-driven. The only significant female figure is Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill), a hard-core lesbian who helps orchestrate Milk’s fourth, successful campaign.
TWEENERS: CONVENTIONAL INDIES?
Van Sant’s Restless served as the opening night of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s secondary series, Certain Regard, which means it was not good enough for the Main Competition, where his previous pictures had premiered. An artistic disappointment and simplistic to a fault, this romantic melodrama of doomed youngsters lacks the nuance, dramatic tension, and bravura visual style expected by now of the director. Anything but what its title implies, the film is a static, inert tale about youth facing untimely mortality. The film fails to have much impact because its vision and scope are limited. There are only two characters, and there is no subtext or subtlety. It might be the most conventional picture that he has made thus far. (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was an artistic and commercial flop, but it was not banal or routine.)
Mia Wasikowska, one of the most gifted and busiest actress around (she had appeared back-to-back in Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right, and Jane Eyre), plays Annabel Cotton, a terminal cancer patient with a deeply felt love of life and special penchant for the natural world—specifically, water birds. She is contrasted with Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper, son of Dennis), a youngster who has dropped out of school (and life) after an accident claimed his parents’ lives. Elegantly dressed in white shirt, black tie, and black jacket, Enoch is a funeral junkie obsessed with death; he spends his time attending one memorial service after another.
When these outsiders meet by chance at a funeral, they find an unexpected common ground in their experience of the world. For Enoch, this (fantasy) world includes his best friend, Hiroshi (Ryô Kase), who happens to be the ghost of a Kamikaze fighter pilot. For Annabel, it involves an admiration of Charles Darwin and a strong interest in how other creatures live. As the last thing on Enoch’s mind is to befriend or court a girl, he rejects with cynicism (actually self-protection) Annabel’s efforts to get closer to him. However, upon learning of Annabel’s imminent death, Enoch offers his company through her last days. (The film could have easily been titled Last Days.) What begins as a “rescue” mission on Enoch’s part turns into an irreverent abandon that tempts fate and death itself.
It soon becomes clear that Enoch and Annabel are experiencing true love for the first time; in her case, it’s also her last love. The film’s stronger scenes evoke memorable, eccentric screen romances, such as Harold and Maude, in which the protagonists, an older woman and a suicidal youngster, also meet at a cemetery and also are obsessed with death. As conceived by writer Jason Lew, other scenes contain cute lines that belong to a schmaltzy picture like the 1970 blockbuster Love Story.
As their love for each other grows, the realities of the surrounding world are closing in on Enoch and Annabel. Daring, childlike, and incurably romantic, the two bravely face what life has in store for them. With some playfulness and originality, the misfits go through the motions of pain, anger, and loss, trying to make (and then live by) their own rules. Inevitably, their journey begins to collide with the unstoppable march of time as Annabel’s condition deteriorates.
It’s hard to see what attracted Van Sant to the material, as he doesn’t bring any particularly illuminating insights to the tale or to its central characters. In theory, the movie is meant to be a hymn to life, a celebration of the redemptive power of love, but in practice, most of what unfolds on screen is overly familiar from other, better tales. The film’s problems reside in its conception and writing by first-timer Lew, who was a New York University classmate of Bryce Dallas Howard, director Ron Howard’s daughter; both father and daughter are among the film’s producers. The episodic screenplay betrays its origins as a collection of short stories, which were then developed into a stage play. Unfortunately, Van Sant and Lew isolate their protagonists from their surroundings. Enoch has two scenes with his aunt, played by gifted character actress Jane Adams (Happiness), who’s totally wasted. For her part, Annabel has a family, but her interactions with her sister and mother are limited, too.
Lacking subtlety and depth, Restless gives the impression of an unfinished screenplay and a movie that might have been executed too quickly, without fully developing its dramatic potential. That said, Van Sant should be credited for refusing to make either a schmaltzy Hollywood picture like the crass and cute Love Story or a sentimental TV Movie of the Week to play on the Oxygen Channel.
The critical response to the Sony Pictures Classics release was decidedly negative. The bright Variety critic Justin Chang represented many others when he described the film’s contradictory nature as “at once delicate and clumsy, tender and twee,” struggling to balance the “low-key sweetness” with the “self-consciously cutesy” aspects of the tale.53 After a limited distribution in major urban centers, Restless was put to rest as an immediately forgettable work from an otherwise distinguished director.
Released in 2012, Promised Land, in which he served as gun-for-hire, is an equally disappointing enterprise. The soft-centered tale is set in a small town where a natural gas company seeks to extract gas from shale rock formations through a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Beginning with its title, the feature is a heavy-handed ecological message picture; the screenplay, written by actors John Krasinski and Matt Damon, is based on a story from prolific novelist and journalist Dave Eggers.
In his third teaming with Van Sant as a lead actor, Damon54 stars as Steve Butler, a corporate salesman whose journey from farm boy to big-time player takes an unexpected detour when he lands in the small town of McKinley. Steve has been dispatched there with his sales partner, Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand). Because the town has been hit hard by the economic decline, the two sales executives think that its residents would accept their company’s offer to lease the drilling rights.
The plot follows the two as they try to persuade community members to lease the drilling rights of their farmland to Global Crosspower Solutions one of the largest energy corporations in the country. As expected, the townspeople have divergent opinions about whether this is a good idea. Some feel that the lease is the only viable measure to keep their family farms from foreclosure. However, what initially seems like an easy sell and a short stay gradually becomes complicated by calls for communitywide consideration of the offer. Unfortunately, the characters represent an aggregate of types, including Frank (veteran actor Hal Holbrook), a schoolteacher; Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt), also a school teacher; and Dustin (Krasinski), a slick environmental activist whose arrival pushes personal and professional crises to a boiling point.
Van Sant saw the film as an opportunity to explore “America as a big place, in which we are all part, and so it’s hard to really get a grasp on our identity. What I loved about the screenplay is that it tackled big issues, but with a lot of humor and humility. It’s a story about real people with all their foibles and greatness.”55 The director said he was intrigued by the protagonist, Steve Butler, who’s a contemporary Everyman (Damon’s specialty as a screen star). Steve had left the farming community where he grew up because it was dying. He migrated to the big city in search of opportunities, and, indeed, he lands a good job and makes good money. A corporate guy, he thinks that what he’s doing is right; he doesn’t feel bad about trying to get ahead. On the road for too long as a salesman, this is his chance to reach the executive level.
When Steve shows up in McKinley with his partner, Sue, their agenda is twofold, to help save the town from financial decay while simultaneously boosting their company. Steve figures it will be a smooth operation, based on his heartland background and his ability to speak its language. However, these traits prove to be both his strength and his weakness, ultimately forcing him to take stock of his existence and his own set of values. Said Van Sant: “The whole idea of democracy is dependent upon people working together, and without compromise, there can be no democracy. How would our parents or grandparents have handled what we face in our day and age? How are our grandchildren going to fare? Those are big and tough questions for anyone to deal with. Until we question everything, we’re not going to have any possibility of a future that’s within our control.”56
Unlike most of Van Sant’s films, Promised Land is a sentimental, Capraesque tale whose main reward is watching Matt Damon cast against type as the smooth-talking salesman out to cheat country folk of the same stock as himself. It aims to raise poignant questions of how quintessentially American values have devolved, but the execution is frustratingly conventional, and the narrative unfolds in broad, predictable strokes of black and white, good and bad. As a result, the film was dismissed by most critics as a simplistic agitprop, a messagy picture inferior to such issue-oriented features as Norma Rae, The China Syndrome, Erin Brockovich, and North Country, all of which deal with labor, ecological, and environmental problems by celebrating heroic individuals. Focus Features, which distributed the movie in the Christmas season, hoping for Oscar considerations, took a major loss when Promised Land grossed a meager $7.5 million at the domestic box office.
Like John Waters, Van Sant experienced the best and most crucial phase of his career in his first decade as a filmmaker, from Mala Noche in 1985 to To Die For in 1995. During that time, he served as American cinema’s major chronicler of youth disengagement and alienation, shown in a series of transgressive depictions of anomie and transient life. It’s hard to think of another American director who has been so consistent in developing an idiosyncratic (truly inimitable) style, defined by nonlinear narratives, arresting imagery of unusual objects, languorous rhythms, and disorienting music. Early on, critic D. K. Holmes observed: “Beneath the humor and whimsy of Van Sant’s work lurks a bleak, frightening vision,”57 which may explain his preoccupation with disenfranchised individuals who die prematurely.
Like Soderbergh, the poster child of New American Independent Cinema ever since his stunning 1989 debut, sex, lies, and videotape, Van Sant has navigated (at time smoothly, at other times roughly) between small-scale, low-budget indies and more mainstream commercial fare. Clearly, the audience for his personal art films is very limited. It is not a coincidence that all four of his youth films in the new millennium have underperformed, grossing around $1 to $3 million in the domestic marketplace.
Even so, whether independent or more mainstream, Van Sant has remarkably maintained his distinctive voice as an auteur with a consistent vision. “He’s very intuitive and spontaneous but also very precise and decisive,” Savides said. “There’s only one guideline for everything and anything that he does, which is what his gut instincts tell him.”58 Van Sant himself has said, “I’m not a film historian type, like Scorsese, who’s seen everything. I’m influenced by what I happen to stumble upon,”59 which explains the spontaneous yet iconoclastic nature of his films.
As this book goes to press, I can only report briefly (sight unseen) on Van Sant’s latest feature, The Sea of Trees, a dramatic suicide mystery written by Chris Sparling, with a high-profile cast headed by Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey (The Dallas Buyers Club) and Oscar nominees Ken Watanabe and Naomi Watts. Announced as a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (where most of the director’s features have debuted), the drama, budgeted at $25 million, belongs to Van Sant’s mid-range projects (like Milk). A male-driven drama about a married American named Arthur Brennan, who intends to kill himself in the “suicide forest,” where he meets a Japanese mad named Takumi Nakamura (Watanabe) who is there for the same reason, Sea of Trees very much belongs to the director’s thematic universe. The site, Aokigahara forest, at the base of Mount Funi, is known for its numerous suicides. Upon meeting, the two men embark on a journey of self-reflection and discovery, which is also a motif of the director’s work, though this time around it centers on adults rather than youths.
GUS VAN SANT FILMOGRAPHY
| 1981 |
Alice in Hollywood (never released) |
| 1985 |
Mala Noche |
| 1989 |
Drugstore Cowboy |
| 1991 |
My Own Private Idaho |
| 1993 |
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues |
| 1995 |
Kids (as producer) |
| 1995 |
To Die For |
| 1997 |
Good Will Hunting |
| 1998 |
Psycho |
| 2000 |
Finding Forrester |
| 2001 |
Gerry |
| 2002 |
Elephant |
| 2005 |
Last Days |
| 2007 |
Paranoid Park |
| 2008 |
Milk |
| 2011 |
Restless |
| 2012 |
Promised Land |
| 2015 |
The Sea of Trees |