Just which film critics are we to trust anymore? Individual reactions toward film have become so diverse among film reviewers that the aesthetic relativism can be alienating to the reader. Many cinemaphiles make it a practice not to read anything more than a plot synopsis when choosing what to see, so their expectations are not influenced, and so they can make up their own minds whether it was any good. You can hardly blame them for such an approach, for what if you find all critical opinion decidedly in opposition to your own?

Last weekend at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts I left thoroughly unengaged by Gus VanSant's heavily-anticipated My Own Private Idaho. Usually you should leave after a film with something new under your belt. But VanSant, who won everyone's cinematic respect with his brilliantly fresh and human Drugstore Cowboy, apparently got lazy and thought he could produce another milestone by riding on his quirky style, his trademark high-speed clouds passing overhead with their dark bellies metaphorically signaling the desperate underside of the Pacific Northwest. But quirkiness is all we're left with this time, and we don't know what to do with it. VanSant doesn't give us a chance to identify with the two tales within Idaho, and allow us to subsequently benefit from the adventures of the two central heroes.

But then I read the latest issue of Film Comment and we have their nine top critics present their "Ten Best" lists for the year 1991. Idaho was on five of them. Donald Lyons goes as far as to call it "The best American movie of the Nineties!" (A specious designation, to be sure, considering the decade has only lasted two years.) Petty college-paper reviewers such as myself easily second-guess their judgement when they find themselves dissenting from the majority opinion. What did they see in Idaho that I didn't?

As they say, one film critic's meat, another film critic's poison.

The film opens with River Phoenix as a young and scruffy boy named Mike Waters, standing on a rural road looking heavily unkempt - like he just got up from a long nap. And he probably did, we realize, as we soon watch him crumple to the pavement in a narcoleptic fit. The camera offers us a dictionary definition of "narcolepsy" to assist the vocabularically-challenged: "a condition characterized by brief attacks of deep sleep." Undoubtedly this condition has fragmented Mike's conscious life, and this is also representative of his disconnected past. Before each seizure we are given a glimpse of Mike's dreams of his mother, who deserted him when he was a child growing up in pastoral Idaho. VanSant then presents a sequence of salmon struggling upstream, and we realize what Mike's quest is: to find his mother and return to his roots (his "own private Idaho," if you will).

Mike ends up street hustling in the Portland area for three-ish years, where he is befriended by a fellow gigolo, Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves). Scott's idiosyncrasies include spouting neo-Shakespearean verse, but this clues us in to VanSant's true design: Scott's story is lifted directly from Henry the Fourth, Part One by the master dramatist himself. Anyone who has taken English 202 or 203 can recognize the lines: nearly one-third of the entire film is a contemporary rendition of Act 1 Scene 2, Act 2 Scenes 2 and 4, and Act 3 Scene 2. Scott/Prince Hal is actually the son of the Mayor of Portland/King of England but rejects his noble heritage and instead sells his body/hangs out with ruffians under the tutelage of Bob/Falstaff, a grandiose and monstrously overweight street guru whom he calls his "street tutor" and "real father." But Scott turns twenty-one in a week and will then inherit a great deal of money from his father; like Prince Hal, he vows in an aside that he will then change his ways and follow in his father's footsteps. We are also treated to a revamping of Henry's robbing-and-double-cross scene, as Bob recounts his pummeling with paper-thin exaggerations.

Mike and Scott's friendship is reminiscent of that of Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy; both couples were desperately poor, sleeping in sordid conditions, helping each other out, in a tender and nonsexual way. But in Idaho Mike is in truth gay, and is in love with Scott. Scott, however, is decidedly straight, testifying "I only have sex with guys for money." On the trail of Mike's mom, they sit by a campfire and discuss the whole issue: "Two guys can't love each other," says Scott. "I love you, and you don't pay me," replies Mike. Winding up in Rome of all places, Scott falls in love with an Italian farmgirl and deserts Mike, who realizes his mother is nowhere to be found. Later back in Portland, we find Mike and Scott in two different worlds: on one side of a graveyard, Scott site at his father's funeral with his new Italian wife, obviously having re-entered the ranks of the sophisticated political elite, while Mike, on the other side, participated in a more raucous ceremony after Bob's demise. The movie ends with Mike back on a country road, alone and searching; then he passes out, at the mercy of thieves and good Samaritans.

VanSant's camerawork bears a resemblance to the highly unrefined films of the French New Wave of the 1950's and 60's. The emphasis then was on stripping films of their studio-era artifice, by using hand-held cameras, settings outside of studio sets, unembellished dialogue, visual puns, and simple editing. VanSant is leading a similar trend in filmmaking, and the resulting simplicity and choppiness is often a refreshing alternative to the manipulative and often contrived sleekness of Hollywood. His films look more than documentaries than narrative fiction. And in a sense they are documentary in nature, recording an unseemly and chaotic world that the camera's truth-telling abilities allow us to see. With his choice of subject matter and milieu, VanSant continues to champion the cause of the marginalized, of the social undesirables, and tries to give them a voice. Perhaps this is why the film is garnering raves from the cinematic intelligentsia, for its radical choice of exploring the world of homosexual prostitution.

Such novelties cannot excuse the flaws in Idaho's narrative. Neither Phoenix nor Reeves can muster the ability to bring their vapidly-written characters to life. Phoenix looks the role of a disoriented kid who drops his clothes without being fully aware of the nature of his job, but he rattles off lines as though he were reading from cue cards. His lines are few, however, since he spends more time falling asleep than actually doing anything. (This reminds me of Demi Moore's crying through about 90% of Ghost.) Reeves is similarly flat, simply exuding a vague carnality, and the look in his eyes is as though he himself finds his blank verse soliloquies completely absurd. The Henry the Fourth storyline is obtrusive and disrupts the flow of the narrative. It's a very witty idea, but it just doesn't fit. That the duo flies off to Italy is completely out of place, and then this Italian girl pops up from out of nowhere and sweeps Keanu off his feet. In short, there isn't an ounce of humanity or narrative logic in the film. VanSant obviously knows how to use a camera creatively, but he seems to have forgotten how to write a story.

Which brings us back to our original problem of, why did so many other film critics like it? Is it possibly because many critics these days tend to politicize a film's subject matter, and they would think that to condemn Idaho is outright discrimination, an act of homophobia? Manohla Dargis of the Village Voice derides any "jerk who trounces My Own Private Idaho because the subject of gay hustlers is so, uh, distasteful." I'm sorry, Maohla, but I'm not slamming the film because I might find the gay lifestyle inconsistent with a Christian ethic; it's simply poor filmmaking. It's the same thing when I'm greeted with gasps upon confessing that I disliked Dances With Wolves. "But how can you say that! It's about Native Americans!" The subject matter may have been politically correct, but it was a sappy story, my dear, sap straight from the tree.