A sometimes engaging, more often irritating, more often boring portrait of a pair of Portland street hustlers, one of them (River Phoenix) a narcoleptic who's as prone to drop off in mid-embrace as in mid-street, the other (Keanu Reeves) the slumming mayor's son who plans to accept his birthright as soon as he hits the age of twenty-one. The homosexual prostitute is a subject that writer-director Gus Van Sant knows well. Mala Noche, his virtually invisible, or unvisible, or semivisible, black-and-white first film (mostly black), addressed it also. But his unquestioned knowledge of the material suffers a setback from which it never recovers when he elects to whip up echoes -- at times verbatim echoes -- of Shakespeare's Henry IV, in particular around a Falstaffian lowlife ("We have heard the chimes at midnight," and so forth) portrayed by the elusive director of Winter Kills, William Richert -- almost as hip a piece of casting as that of William Burroughs in Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy. This Shakespearean treasure hunt is an uninviting avenue to go, or be taken, down -- although the further down it that one is able to go, the more one is apt to feel that one's education has not been wasted. So much attention, so much care, goes into the authentic costume, the authentic hair, the authentic face, and then up jumps the Prince Hal figure to shatter the illusion with something like: "What trick, what device, can you find to hide from this open and apparent shame?" The effect, a good ways beyond West Side Story or Forbidden Planet, is a little like one of those "modern" productions of Shakespeare that re-locates the action in Nazi Germany, Vietnam, whatever's "relevant." (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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