Did you like the Henry IV story line? Do you think it was well-executed?
Here's an excerpt from an Amy Taubin piece on "Idaho." I think it's a good big-picture description of the film:
What is striking about Idaho today in light of Van Sant’s later films is its extraordinary hybridity. Where Elephant (2003), Gerry (2002), and Psycho (2000) are structured by a single daring formal device—the extended tracking shots in Elephant and Gerry; the shot-by-shot mimicry of Hitchcock’s original in Psycho—Idaho is a collage that includes even a kitchen sink and some Little Dutch Boy cleanser to scrub it down. Van Sant mixes and matches scenes of documentary-style realism with campy musical set pieces, improvised dialogue with bowdlerized Shakespeare, dream sequences shot in grainy Super-8mm with 35mm vistas of the Pacific Northwest, and, on the soundtrack, Rudy Vallee with The Pogues. The main source materials for Idaho’s screenplay were two completely separate scripts and a short story, all written by Van Sant. One of the scripts was a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
Did this work for you? Did you find a coherent whole?
3 comments:
I'm not sold on the Shakespeare. I found the dialogue jarring. I kind of enjoyed the story line, and the Shakespeare feel of it, but every time the dialogue swung back to the Shakespeare, I felt like it called too much attention to itself.
The quasi-Shakespearian dialogue was my favorite part of the film. The switching back and forth had some reasoning to it, but it didn't seem quite as clear as, for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the title characters use contemporary language when talking with each other and Shakespearian language when talking with anyone else.
I was mixed on the Henry IV storyline. I also found it odd for the dialogue to go back and forth. River Phoenix also doesn't seem invested in those scenes nor makes much of an attempt to make them jibe.
The point where Bob arrived through when they began looking for Mike's mother was in and of itself interesting but moved away from the intimacy between Mike and Scott.
I thought it did create a good role for Keanu Reeves and was an interesting take on the charmed son who can run untouched in the streets.
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