MOPI is a mostly grim road movie about Mike (played by River Phoenix). Mike is a poet who falls asleep a lot. When he's awake, his life is like a nightmare. Nobody loves him. In fact, nobody in the movie even seems capable of love. A bad place to look for love. Everybody Mike meets uses him in some way. He has somewhat of a friend in the Keanu Reeves character, who helps him on a journey to find his lost mother, and even manages to take some pity on Mike. But in the end, he's still alone.
Somehow Mike keeps winding up back on the same stretch of lonely scrub-surrounded Idaho highway. A sign on the highway reads "Warning to tourists: don't laugh at the natives."
In the final scene, back on the Idaho highway to nowhere, Mike is poetizing about the road when he falls asleep again. Now we get a bible-like scene -- the parable of the good samaritan. First, close-up, he's robbed of his bag and shoes, then, in a distant camera shot, a car pulls up, parks protectively, and the driver puts him in the front seat and drives away.
It's up to us to decide whether that's a happy ending or not.
The movie is salted with some Shakespeare, and more interestingly with all kinds of American patriotic music, which Van Sant has placed wryly. As in the much earlier "Easy Rider", we're not just seeing the underside of American culture here but some painful truths about America as well.
Why is it called "My Own Private" Idaho? One man's opinion would be one guess ... Van Sant gets credit as the screenwriter. On the other hand, it has a lot of things to say about love ... some things Shakespeare forgot to say ... and so applies to us all. Oh yeah ... and maybe because I.da.ho sucks.
Somehow Mike keeps winding up back on the same stretch of lonely scrub-surrounded Idaho highway. A sign on the highway reads "Warning to tourists: don't laugh at the natives."
In the final scene, back on the Idaho highway to nowhere, Mike is poetizing about the road when he falls asleep again. Now we get a bible-like scene -- the parable of the good samaritan. First, close-up, he's robbed of his bag and shoes, then, in a distant camera shot, a car pulls up, parks protectively, and the driver puts him in the front seat and drives away.
It's up to us to decide whether that's a happy ending or not.
The movie is salted with some Shakespeare, and more interestingly with all kinds of American patriotic music, which Van Sant has placed wryly. As in the much earlier "Easy Rider", we're not just seeing the underside of American culture here but some painful truths about America as well.
Why is it called "My Own Private" Idaho? One man's opinion would be one guess ... Van Sant gets credit as the screenwriter. On the other hand, it has a lot of things to say about love ... some things Shakespeare forgot to say ... and so applies to us all. Oh yeah ... and maybe because I.da.ho sucks.