Tripping Over Your Own Feet Into Greatness; or, “I Can Dodge Failure?”

An inquiry into the entity that
is Keanu Reeves, and what it
may or may not say about
talent, celebrity, terrific looks,
ironic appreciation, and--just
perhaps-- inscrutable genius.

We’ve been aware of him for a full two decades now. He has many names--Ted “Theodore” Logan.; John Constantine; Neo--but, it should be noted, just one immutable face. He first came to widespread attention as Ted Logan, under which name he embarked first upon an excellent adventure, and later--more troublingly--a bogus journey. He is different things to different people: To the more dedicated hipster, he must register (if there’s even room for him among the immense shooting gallery of Pfft!-worthy targets) as one of the go-to derisive references to Mad-Lib into one’s horn-rimmed late-night conversations at Perkins. To the average, casual moviegoer, he’s a solid, reliable, somewhat odd mainstay of action, sci-fi, and romance. And if you were, say, a resident of one of the less developed African nations, he would be entirely absent from your life, but you wouldn’t feel the absence, because you’re starving and don’t have time to think about these things: “Matrix what? Hey, some food would be good about now.”

I’m speaking, of course, of Keanu. Keanu Reeves, if that wasn’t clear. I don’t know (and very much doubt) that there is another Keanu in the world, but if there is, we’ll never know about it, and I’m sure it hasn’t done that guy any good. (Keanu Nelson? Who cares?) At any rate, Keanu (Reeves, not our hypothetical and highly unlikely walking joke-corpse) has been a major player in some of the more notable pop-culture events of the last twenty years. At the very least, he’s been hanging around those events, smoking cigarettes and looking for someone to talk to. The Bill and Ted movies were pretty popular when they came out, and doubtless retain a place in the hyper-nostalgic hearts of many twenty-odds. Speed was a big damn deal when it came out, and the Matrix franchise, even while nailing an impressive .667 Sucking Average, was able to coast through two sequels off the momentum of its pretty-good first movie, and was inarguably a thick ream of flypaper for filmgoers and their money.

But does anyone know--can anyone really understand--how this came to be? How did a proto-surfer with limited facial motility find his way into so many Big Moments in popular film? After all, one would be hard-pressed to find more than twenty people worldwide willing to declare, “Keanu Reeves is my favorite actor.” Factor out indecipherable genius savants and victims of head trauma and that number would drop to zero, or even to a negative number. Or perhaps to an imaginary number (i), a possibility that, I think, gets more to the spirit of Keanu.

To circle back a bit: Let’s return to those hipsters who would drop the K-Bomb with such facility, just to impress their equally horrific friends. (But first yet, allow me to promise that I’ve no intention in this blog to endlessly chant “hipster” as a black-magic incantation/quasi-expletive. I hereby promise to keep such tired bullshit to a minimum, as I believe the age of the hipster [or “hipster”] is nearing its end. Denunciations of hipsterism have far outstripped any actual “hipsterism” out there, to the point that, even by using the word, one is declaring oneself just as much a blinkered insult-junky as one’s perceived enemy. It’s getting to the point where the solution is throwing spittle all over everyone while the problem is most likely receding. It’s almost more hipster-ish to denounce hipsters than to actually be one [whatever that entails—I don’t even know anymore]. Hipsterism has reached the unfortunate stage of Super-Ultra-Meta, which is reason enough for me to end this matryoshka tangent. Let’s just pretend it never happened.)

Anyway. Anybody so inclined could easily spend two days or more writing clever descriptions of Keanu Reeves, with nary a pause in the keyboard clatter. For example: “Well-put-together meat puppet.” “Surprisingly talented block of wood.” “Morose, sentient Furbee.” “Prettier Chauncey Gardiner.” “Earnestly monotone Bullock-attractor.” “The Uncanny Valley.” But enough of that. It’s all very fun, but it doesn’t really address what’s going on here. After all, Keanu presumably leads an actual life somewhere. We know, for instance, that his ex-girlfriend was killed in a car accident some years ago, and that it affected him, most certainly in ways we’ll never see onscreen. We know that he’s worked with Alex Winter, who may seem more human than Keanu, but hey, do you think he has millions and millions of dollars? We know that he fronts Dogstar, a band whose music nobody in the world has ever been known to hear (and keep in mind that, according to the most recent census data, at least seventeen people have heard recordings by Russell Crowe’s band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts). I’m also pretty sure there’s a vague notion out there that Keanu is “spiritual” in some sense. Most likely it has something to do with eastern mysticism—maybe Zen Buddhism or Transcendental Meditation… something along those lines. So there is, at the very least, the illusion of depth there.

But it isn’t with the flesh-and-blood Keanu Reeves--the one who eats, sleeps, files his taxes, and possibly hugs people--that I’m concerned. I am dealing solely with the Keanu who brings us yearly tidings of cinematic joy, hope, and befuddlement, like a very pretty Santa Claus after a moderate kabonking with a frying pan. To come to the point: I want to know why I love him. I want to know the nature of that love.

I think a good place to start would be his performance in Gus Van Sant’s masterful My Own Private Idaho. The film is an excellent example of Keanu being in a movie and that movie not suffering in the least for his presence. It might be argued, by cynics and higher-brow-than-thou types, that the movie works despite Keanu’s idiosyncratic performance and not because of it. After all, the man is asked to hold his own against River Phoenix in a scrappy, sensitive film about male prostitutes in Portland—a film whose dialogue and plotline are largely inspired by Shakespeare, no less. “Whoa,” indeed. Yet I don’t think our man hits a false note in the entire movie, because he’s cast right. His character is both quite real and an ultimate sellout, yet at once. He’s a sincere fraud, which kind of makes him not a fraud at all--which, if you follow, is maybe a perfect description of Keanu Reeves himself.

* * *

Flash-forward fifteen years or so, and we have another classic—if overlooked—Keanu performance in Constantine. Here is a movie that never should have been anything more than a pile of crap. That’s what I expected of it when I grudgingly entered the auditorium after finding that Wes Craven’s Cursed was no longer playing at my favorite multiplex. Maybe it was just the expectation of awfulness, but two hours later, I left with a big, stupid goddamn grin on my face, and I wasn’t sorry. I turned to my favorite bad-movie-going companion and said something like, “I’ve had a big dumb grin on my face for the last two hours. I loved that movie.” Surprisingly, she agreed, and since neither of us was drunk or on drugs, we had to conclude that we had enjoyed a daffy-ass Keanu movie, un-ironically and unapologetically.

Here’s the deal with Constantine: One of the first scenes has Keanu straddling a possessed child and hissing to the demon inside: “This is Constantine… John Constantine, asshole.” You can probably guess that he kicks that particular demon’s ass, then goes on to further and darker adventures. The plot doesn’t get much more intelligent after that first confrontation--just more complicated--yet it all kicks a sort of ass. To be honest, I don’t remember what the plot involves, even though I proudly own the DVD. What I do remember involves Constantine having inoperable lung cancer, which is entertaining enough in itself, and eventually, after the main adventure (whatever it was), Satan Himself taking away Keanu’s cancer, for some reason.

Surprisingly, the movie boasts really capable cinematography. It simply looks very, very good. Also, Peter Stormare plays the Devil, chewing not only the scenery, but also the ham on the scenery. Then he goes out, buys more ham, puts it on the scenery, and rolls around chewily on the whole hammy tableau, and it’s just awesome. His Devil is a mincing, vaguely Europe-y dandy, wearing a white suit and giving Ray Wise a run for his money as Best Character Actor Willing to Give Himself Fully to Fun, Fun Schlock. Also, Tilda Swinton is in there somewhere, being just as great as she always is.

But Reeves is the self-serious glue holding the whole thing together. He doesn’t just deliver his lines with a lack of irony. He delivers them with utter conviction, and with that certain surfer gravitas only he can pull off--like he’s the only one not in on the joke, and without whom the joke could not possibly work. But really, if the movie acted only as a winking, self-hating parody, it would fail. There are enough of those out there, and not every satire can be Starship Troopers. It’s a small miracle that Reeves comes off as sincere without seeming the sour, square-jawed buzz-kill. Rather, he’s just one piece of a big, delightful pie.

To touch briefly on a few seminal, archetypal K-Roles: The man’s for-real fame obviously came out of the Bill and Ted movies, where he played a dim-bulb valley boy, time-traveling with his buddy Alex “I was in Bill and Ted” Winter. There’s really not a lot to say about these movies that they don’t say for themselves, except that they’re actually fairly entertaining, even if you aren’t watching them with that smug-ass look on your face that only children of the ‘80s can hate themselves enough to wear. Keanu puts the right-shaped block into the right-shaped holes as usual, exuding a floppy, care-free dippy-ness and by all evidence knowing that he’s in a movie made for questionably-haired teens.

There’s also Point Break, where Reeves plays, um, a dim-bulb valley boy; only this time he’s also an FBI agent who infiltrates a gang of surfing, thrill-seeking bank robbers. And they rob banks in masks depicting caricatures of ex-presidents. And he comes to identify with the leader of the group, and it’s all very conflicted, but he does the right thing and blah blah blah… By now this is more reference than movie, but I’m guessing it did pretty well when it was released. I know I saw it on video when I was a kid. Oh. Did I mention that the main bad guy (although he’s, you know, spiritual and stuff) is played by Patrick Swayze? Yes, he is. So this is the only movie where Keanu decisively out-acts his major co-star. Swayze does his usual glassy-eyed-Buddhist routine; it’s the kind of performance that makes you think of nothing more than an aging soap-opera star doing a rare movie in between mall appearances. Honestly, Keanu doesn’t do much here to actually upstage Swayze; he just stays relatively quiet and doesn’t assert himself, thereby maintaining his dignity while Swayze embarrasses himself merely by appearing onscreen. So it isn’t so much a Reeves performance as a Reeves stand-in gig. Gary Busey’s in the movie, but he isn’t pretty or young or even especially sane, so here’s Keanu. Have fun.

Oh, and Speed--same goes for that movie. There’s action, and it needs a warm body to throw around for a while. Jan de Bont put out a newspaper ad offering sandwiches. Keanu showed up. Speed was made.

Then the zeitgeist: The Matrix trilogy. I have to admit, I was able to get behind The Matrix the first, where the Wachowski brothers showed a real aptitude for atmosphere, creating a sense of dread and foreboding before cutting loose with the cool-ass action. Even if it was ultimately grounded in a fairly tired solipsistic conceit, it was effective both as a low-level horror movie and as an innovative action film. And the characters were, if not completely absorbing, at least interesting enough to carry a deceptively simple sci-fi actioner. KeaNeo was just what Reeves should and always will be—very serious and very confused. Neo seems credibly surprised that he knows kung fu and can dodge bullets--and Keanu had very probably just read those lines himself, so his lack of preparation as School-Shooter-Messiah Role-Model rang true.

But then we get into hairier territory with the idiotically titled The Matrix Reloaded and the pretentiously titled The Matrix Revolutions. I have to admit I never saw the latter, nor cared to after seeing the former. The Matrix Reloaded (Bee-otch!!) delivered some fairly decent action, but the plot was almost maliciously convoluted, and so full of sophomore-philosophy-major claptrap that it was at once maddeningly confusing and jaw-droppingly stupid. (I’m told there was also The Animatrix, a cartoon addition to the series that piled on more batshit mythology to this over-plotted mess.) As I’ve said, I didn’t stick around for the denouement of the trilogy (or whatever it is, with all the ancillary cartoons and fan-fic and whatnot), but, if I remember correctly, it seemed even in the second installment that Keanu was in way over his head, that he truly didn’t get what the hell was going on by now—which, to be fair, is understandable, as anyone who either had gone past that second year as a philosophy major or who had a shred of common sense would be immensely frustrated well before the overstuffed credits rolled.

There are innumerable (well, okay, numerable) other Reeves films, many of which I should probably see--The Lake House, for instance­­--before attempting any kind of comprehensive study of this inscrutable man, this delightful cipher. I would in fact make a point of sitting through each one were it not for one insurmountable obstacle: Many of the man’s films have been banned as subversive. And by that, I mean I don’t feel like watching them all just now. But believe this: I fully intend to visit each and every Keanu Reeves film, regardless of whether they’ve been buried by a fearful and corrupt government, which I assure you they have not.

Before all this fame, Keanu turned in an affecting performance in Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, a sad, disturbing film about teenagers (including a terrifying Crispin Glover) dealing with--and not dealing with--the murder of a friend by another friend. It’s a scary story in which Reeves, if I remember correctly, is more or less the good guy. It’s yet another movie where he’s cast just right, and it offers even more evidence that Keanu Reeves can only be successfully used as a very specific character actor or as a flesh-dummy to fill out action movies and romantic trifles.

I’d still like to kiss him, even though I know that kiss would be clammy and unresponsive. But it would also be compelling. Kissing Keanu Reeves, even as the securely heterosexual man that I am, would be compelling, and undeniably worth it.