Throughout his career, Keanu Reeves has eschewed obvious transformation in favor of something trickier and more subtle. angelicabastien writes on his longevity and recent resurgence
Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho. Photo: Fine Line Features In his 14 minutes of screentime in Always Be My Maybe, Netflix’s latest rom-com phenomenon, 54-year-old Keanu Reeves — now 30 years into his stardom — skewers and subverts the personas we’ve come to attach to him.
Reeves is having a dynamite year with the success of Always Be My Maybe, the outrageously violent John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum, and Toy Story 4, in which he plays Canada’s greatest stunt driver, Duke Caboom. The actor’s more recent evolution into a meme may flatten his complexities, but it does signal why he has endured all this time, despite the persistent claim that he’s a bad actor, or just a limited one. As I’ve contended in the past, this is a gross misreading of a great actor.
They come through in one of his earliest films, My Own Private Idaho, a meditative character study about two young hustlers — Mike Waters , a shy narcoleptic in search of a sense of home, and the strikingly beautiful Scott Favor , a trust-fund kid slumming it until his inheritance kicks in at 21. Reeves and his late co-star imbue their characters with a particular mix of virility, vulnerability, and mystery.
Nancy Meyer’s 2003 ode to beachside property and an older woman’s sensual awakening stars Keaton as a successful playwright who finds herself falling for two very different men — Harry Sanborn , who briefly dated her daughter and has to go through a damn heart attack before he can see what’s attractive in a woman around his own age; and Julian Mercer , a sweet doctor with a penchant for black turtlenecks who is immediately smitten when they meet.
That intimacy is key to Reeves’s longevity. It’s what makes him such a great cinematic sensualist. In 2009, Matt Zoller Seitz argued that directors Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai, and Hou Hsiao-hsien were the “the decade’s best sensualists filmmakers.” He wrote, “They share a defining trait: a lyrical gift for showing life in the moment, for capturing experience as it happens and as we remember it. The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping.
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