River Phoenix

River Phoenix: The Actor Who Never Looked Like Acting

At eighteen he was nominated for an Academy Award, the sixth-youngest man ever nominated in the supporting category. Between the ages of three and seven he had been a child missionary for the Children of God in Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Mexico. He and his siblings had busked for money on the streets of Westwood. At twenty-one he won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. At twenty-three he was dead on a pavement on Sunset Strip.

Children of God

River Jude Phoenix was born on 23 August 1970 in Madras, Oregon, to Arlyn Dunetz — Jewish, of Russian and Hungarian descent — and John Lee Bottom, a lapsed Catholic from Fontana, California. From 1973 to 1977 the family worked as missionaries for the Children of God, a cult, moving through Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Mexico. They got out, and around 1979 took the surname Phoenix, after the bird that burns and returns. River was the eldest of five: Rain, Joaquin, Liberty and Summer. The family settled in Los Angeles with no money and an unusual set of skills.

Busking in Westwood

What they had was performance. The Phoenix children sang on the street in Westwood, where the talent agent Iris Burton found them. River started working at ten, in commercials and television, and in 1982 joined the CBS series *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*. His film debut came in *Explorers* in 1985, alongside another unknown named Ethan Hawke. He had spent his childhood performing for adults with an agenda, and it shows up in the work.

Stand by Me

Rob Reiner's 1986 adaptation of Stephen King's novella *The Body* made him famous. He played Chris Chambers — cool, smart, passionate, carrying a stolen pistol and the weight of his family's bad name, and functioning as a father figure to boys his own age. It is Chris who pushes Gordie to keep writing. Paul Attanasio in the *Washington Post* singled him out. *The Mosquito Coast* came the same year, and then Sidney Lumet's *Running on Empty* (1988), the performance that brought him the Academy Award nomination he lost to Kevin Kline. *Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade* followed in 1989.

My Own Private Idaho

Gus Van Sant's 1991 film cast him as Mike Waters, a street hustler with narcolepsy, travelling from Portland to Idaho and on to Rome in search of his mother, alongside Keanu Reeves as Scott Favor, the mayor's son. Then there is the campfire scene, in which Mike confesses that he is in love with Scott. Phoenix rewrote it. He expanded three script pages into eight and made Mike's homosexuality explicit where the screenplay had left it ambiguous, and Van Sant used all of it: "He kept the whole thing. He didn't pare it down." David Ansen called the result "a marvel of delicacy" and "a stunningly sensitive performance, poignant and comic at once"; Vincent Canby thought Phoenix and Reeves had found "two best roles they'll find in years." Three separate juries agreed: the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice, the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead, and Best Actor from the National Society of Film Critics. He was twenty-one. *Dogfight* arrived the same year, *Sneakers* in 1992, *The Thing Called Love* in 1993.

Vegan at Seven

He stopped eating animals at seven and never resumed, which in the Hollywood of the 1980s made him a curiosity rather than a trend. Martha Plimpton, who was his girlfriend, remembered the intensity of it: "Once when we were fifteen… He had such pain that I was eating an animal, that he hadn't impressed on me what was right." PETA gave him its Humanitarian Award in 1992. He bought eight hundred acres of endangered Costa Rican rainforest with his own money. He also fronted a band, Aleka's Attic, formed with his sister Rain and playing a kind of progressive folk-rock.

The Viper Room

From around 1991 he was using cocaine, heroin and marijuana, though accounts of how heavily still differ; his relationship with Plimpton had ended in 1989 partly over it. On the night of 31 October 1993 he went to the Viper Room on Sunset Strip, a club part-owned by Johnny Depp, to perform with P, a band containing friends from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Outside on the pavement he went into convulsions. Joaquin called 911; Rain gave him mouth-to-mouth. The coroner recorded acute multiple drug intoxication: cocaine and heroin, each present at a level independently sufficient to have killed him, along with marijuana, benzodiazepines and propoxyphene. He was twenty-three.

Why River Is Called a Genius

The word gets attached to beautiful young dead people almost automatically, and any honest assessment has to start by conceding that. What can actually be defended is narrower and stranger: Phoenix possessed an instrument, not a technique. On screen he did not appear to be performing. He appeared to be thinking, and to be unable to conceal the thought — the thing actors spend thirty years trying to counterfeit, and which he seems to have arrived with. The campfire scene in *My Own Private Idaho* is the proof case, and it also disposes of the idea that he was a passive natural: he rewrote it himself, taking three pages to eight and forcing into the open what the script had hedged. Nothing in the result is virtuosic — no volume, no breakdown, no visible technique, just a young man saying an unbearable thing badly, which is how people actually say unbearable things. David Ansen's phrase, "a marvel of delicacy," is precise. And the evidence is not merely sentimental. Three adult juries in three countries, with no reason to indulge a 21-year-old, independently named him best actor for that film, and the Academy had nominated him at eighteen.

The counter-case is heavy. His filmography is short and much of it is ordinary studio work; he never made a film in his thirties, or his forties, and so was never tested by the thing that breaks most prodigies, which is time. The claim that he would have become one of the great actors of his generation is unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable claims are how legends are manufactured. His influence on Leonardo DiCaprio, Jared Leto and James Franco is partly an influence of image. And genius, properly used, implies a body of work that reorganises a field; Phoenix left performances, not a revolution. The accurate sentence is that he had a rare and possibly unteachable gift for appearing unguarded on camera, and that he died before anyone could find out what it was for.

Legacy

Christian Slater, who replaced him in *Interview with the Vampire*, gave his entire $250,000 salary to Earth Save and Earth Trust, the charities Phoenix had supported. Joaquin Phoenix, accepting his own Academy Award at the 92nd ceremony, ended by quoting a lyric his brother wrote at seventeen: "run to the rescue with love and peace will follow." He later named his son River. The films remain what they were, which is the only durable argument: a boy in *Stand by Me* who is better than his circumstances, and a young man beside a fire in Idaho, telling the truth to someone who cannot hear it.

Achievements

• Acted professionally from childhood
• Star of 'Stand by Me' at age 15 (1986)
• Academy Award nomination at age 18 for 'Running on Empty'
• Acclaimed role in 'My Own Private Idaho'