WHY DOES EVERYONE LIKE KEANU REEVES?
We take advantage of the fact that he has just released his latest film 'John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum', to review the career of an actor who has made his expressionlessness his watchword.
On June 15, 2010, Keanu Reeves became a meme. A photograph of the actor eating a sandwich on a bench generated jokes, montages and reflections. The apparently everyday image connected with millions of people around the world: Keanu's empty gaze, dressed like a dandy but eating like a worker, his position at the far right of the bench and not in the center (leaving space for his companions : a cloth bag and the white paper of the sandwich) and, above all, the dove that pecked on the ground without noticing that it had a superstar next to it, forged a human still life about the futility of existence, the ephemerality of material possessions and the weary meaning of life.
What was relevant about this viral phenomenon was not the photo itself, more anecdotal than revealing, but the collective reaction of the internet. Some people were quick to recall the tragedies the actor has endured: his father abandoned him when he was 3 years old, his best friend River Phoenix died of an overdose, his daughter was stillborn in 1999 and his relationship with his girlfriend ended within a few weeks. (she, after two years depressed, died in a traffic accident), the "demonic trips" (driving at full speed without lights) on her motorcycle that have caused several serious accidents, have filled her body with huge scars and in once a woman asked for an autograph while he lay dying on the floor with two broken teeth and a splayed chin; and his sister Kim, with whom Keanu lived for years, has suffered from leukemia.
But other users chose to share stories that show Keanu Reeves' generosity: when he gave $ 20,000 to a Matrix set builder to avoid eviction, when he bought a Harley-Davidson for each member of the filming of the scene in the who faces multiple Smith agents in Matrix Reloaded to thank them for their sacrifice and patience, when he renegotiated his contract for the Matrix sequels so that part of his salary (millions of dollars) was destined to raise the salary of technicians or when he paid for your pocket breakfast and lunch from your movie crew. Suddenly, June 15 stopped being Sad Keanu Day ("the day of sad Keanu") to become known as Cheer Up Keanu Day ("the day to cheer Keanu"). This affectionate move is the antithesis of the Sad Affleck meme, because Ben Affleck (whose arrogance, vices, and jaw represent white male privilege, despite coming from Boston's working class) doesn't seem to embarrass anyone. As Richard Linklater, who directed Reeves A Scanner Darkly, explains, "the audience always joins in on his mission and gets on Keanu's train, looks at him and feels like they know him."
Keanu Reeves became famous in an extravagant period for American cinema: Hollywood took stars very seriously, audiences took stars very seriously (assuming, for example, that if a movie had two famous actors it is because it was so good) and the stars took themselves extremely seriously. The time when Susan Sarandon took advantage of the Oscars to denounce the situation of the Haitian refugees, in which Richard Gere became the unofficial ambassador of Tibet in the United States and in which Tom Hanks called for a loud applause for the AIDS patients to pick up your Oscar. Keanu Reeves' fame was like going to Honolulu for the weekend, falling in love with the hotel bartender, and sleeping with him while playing a radio tape with Nirvana, Enya and Ace Of Base. It was exotic, it was harmless, and it was inconsequential.
He was the type of man who would define himself as a “citizen of a place called the world” and therefore contrasted with that generation of actors who when you asked them where they were from, said the city and the state as if they were cadets: Val Kilmer , Rob Lowe, Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff. “Emilio [Estevez] and I would sit down and say 'but how did this guy get in?'” Charlie Sheen wondered, “How can Keanu work with Coppola and Bertolucci and I don't even have a chance to try?”
So is. Keanu Reeves' career matured and fell from the tree of teenage folders much faster even than those of the Holy Trinity of his generation (the ones chosen, from the beginning, as destined to mutate into real actors: Pitt, DiCaprio and Depp) thanks to Dangerous Friendships, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Much Ado About Nothing or The Little Buddha. Responding to Charlie Sheen's completely rhetorical question, Bertolucci claimed to have hired him for his ability to convey innocence and Coppola acknowledged that the studio imposed on Reeves because they wanted a teenage idol and perhaps that is why he was the only character in the film who did not He wore a wardrobe straight out of an erotic Gustav Klimt nightmare, but instead wore a brown suede vest straight out of a Seattle flea market. The results were appalling.
"Is Keanu Reeves a good bad actor or a bad good actor?" wondered the New York Times. His intermittent British accent on Dracula sparked editorials in major American media and the scene in which the three "bitches of Satan" (nickname coined by Anthony Hopkins, not Vanity Fair) try to turn him into a vampire? through a fellatio? Reeves reacts with such nonchalance that the collective assumption began to spread that he wasn't even a bad actor: he was a deadpan actor. A perfect face to listen to Nirvana, Enya or Ace Of Base but unworthy for the prestigious period dramas whose photography we spend so many Sunday afternoons admiring with our parents.
“Keanu Reeves is not so much a bad actor as a non-actor, but he is definitely a star,” writes Joe Queenan for The Guardian, “and once someone becomes a star, questioning their acting talent is not just irrelevant, it borders on the rude. His career has always reminded me of John Wayne's: a charismatic but limited actor who made many abject films but who, thanks to his looks and his cunning to participate in great films, once the public fell in love with him they never stopped loving him ”.
In Speed, a film whose storyline Hollywood executives laughed at for months before its release until it became a private industry joke, Keanu Reeves effectively approached his character as a John Wayne adapted to Super Pop. witness to the calm man who never flinches and who does what he has to do for the simple reason that it is what he has to do, but in his body this canonical myth of American masculinity was turning new age: he has the hair of a marine (the studio considered delaying filming for several months because they were convinced that the hair was the only reason for Reeves' success), the face of a native of a place called the world (like the tasting menu of an "oriental" restaurant: untraceable, but definitely exotic) and the gallantry of the son-in-law your mother always dreamed of. His name means "cool breeze over the mountains" and that is exactly what viewers feel when they see him on a screen.
Cop Jack Travers was Bruce Willis without that sneer to remind us every 45 seconds that he is a man. It was Sylvester Stallone, but treating the girl (Sandra Bullock), the passengers and even the villain (Dennis Hopper) like human beings. Reeves doesn't act thinking about his brand, his product or the movies that will be offered to him after this: he acts like a guy who got up that day, like every morning, with the intention of making the world a good place. Joe Queenan continues, “audiences view his characters more with affection than reverence or idolatry, like a little brother who wants to cover more than he can squeeze. When we go to see his films, we don't want him to prevail, we want him to survive ”. What happens in his films produces as much surprise, bewilderment, or bewilderment as it does the viewer. When Travers explains that "there is a bomb on this bus that will detonate if we go below 80, so I ask all of you to please sit down" or when he indicates to the driver Annie that, to overcome the gap in the highway under construction Reeves expresses himself with an honesty, logic and eloquence stripped of artifice or drama. He says things as they are. That's the best Keanu Reeves. But Hollywood tried to tame him as if he were any ordinary Christian Slater.
His string of post-Speed failures is like reading an instruction manual for the manufacture of a star in the 90s: romantic heartthrob (A walk in the clouds, in which Aitana Sánchez-Gijón as a good Spanish tourist called him to his face “ fucking dull ”), action hero (Chain Reaction), boy next door in indie romantic comedy (Honeymoonless), and executive caught up in a tech / virtual / internet conspiracy in one of those ubermodern thrillers that aged in real time as we saw them (that same year, her friend Sandra Bullock downloaded the entire internet on a three and a half floppy disk on The Net).
And then Keanu defied gravity.
There are countless reasons why The Matrix is movie history. Literally, no one had ever seen anything like it: our eyes, our ears and our brains experienced unprecedented sensations that woke us, like Thomas Anderson (Reeves' character in the film), from the lethargy into which the dramas about ladies that we had they saved racial minorities and dog-boy comedies in the 90s. For the first time, we felt like we were watching a 21st century movie. But among the thousands of philosophical, theocratic, socio-political, physical, economic and metacultural analyzes that have been written about the Matrix, not enough claim one of its most accurate bullets: that Keanu Reeves in it is the greatest casting success of our time.
Thomas Anderson / Neo personifies all the concerns that have marked Reeves' career and that have drawn him to two issues: loneliness (Sadistic Instinct, his third film, where he played a teenager whose best friend committed suicide; Sweet Home ... sometimes, "you need a license to fish, but nevertheless they leave anyone useless to be a father," he complained to his family; My Private Idaho, Little Buddha, Constantine, John Wick) and the transcendence of the human being (The amazing adventures of Bill and Ted, where his future self warned him to save the cosmos and he was too busy laughing at his own jokes for a mixture of arrogance, nerves and joints; Dracula; The devil's advocate; Sweet November, "this November It's all I know and all I will ever know); The lake House; Ultimatum to Earth and again Little Buddha and Constantine, "God is a boy with an ant farm, he has nothing planned"). Neo, who actually Reeves never stopped playing as Thomas Anderson, was effectively alone and destined to transcend.
As in the best Keanu Reeves roles, Neo only communicates by facts and logic. He only speaks to say pertinent things. And the actor understands that he is not the star, unlike the studio candidates (Will Smith and Tom Cruise) whose demands and ideas for changing the script scared the Wachowskis away, Reeves knew the film was above him. That's why Thomas Anderson never acts like a hero, because he's just a guy who does what he has to do.
When Keanu Reeves becomes expressive, he borders on the shame of others (in Bill and Ted, when playing two characters, it is very noticeable that what he is best at is never completely understanding what is happening around him) and when he gets sad he seems who is counting the seconds for the director to shout "cut, let's eat." But Keanu Reeves is much more than his professional career (and thank goodness, because he has trash for two lives including Killer game, which he had to do because his contract signature was forged and he could not prove it before a judge), he is a star because the The people appreciate him as a colleague of those nobles, of those of "friend of his friends"; and a temporary tenant in Hollywood who has ended up staying because he doesn't bother either: he's in the corner of the party, drinking slowly and being nice to everyone.
There are three mandatory stops in every interview with Keanu Reeves: a pause to smoke a cigarette, a duration that extends beyond the time agreed with the publicist and an anxious need for the journalist to clarify that if the interview is, indeed, bland as hell It is not because of his questions but because of Reeves' scrawny responses. "I'm not going to tell you", "I prefer not to inquire into that topic" or "I suppose so" are his favorite replicas, but at the same time Keanu Reeves responds with the honesty and pure logic that characterizes his characters (in Henry's Crime, produced by him, his character is mistakenly convicted of robbing a bank and when he leaves he decides to rob him because he can no longer be convicted) when he talks about his work.
He explains that he rejected Speed 2 because "it was called Speed and it took place on an ocean liner, an ocean liner is slower than a bus" and that this led to a veto by Fox that would last 15 years. He calls the remake of Ultimatum to Earth "ultimatum to my career" and says that that failure led him to "Hollywood jail", a place where first division offers do not arrive. And he acknowledges that “I've always wanted to play Wolverine, but they didn't give it to me. I also wanted to do The Dark Knight, but they didn't give it to me. There have been many Batmans, so I just enjoy them as a spectator ”. Kenneth Branagh recounted that Keanu did push-ups while reciting Shakespeare. "And while I was filming Speed, I learned the text of Hamlet" adds Reeves in reference to the character with the most phrases of Shakespeare (1476) that he performed in a theater in Winnipeg (Canada) in 1995, "because he had a lot of space in his head." And what does that say about Speed? "That is not Shakespeare."
The interview in which he told this anecdote was his only cover for Rolling Stone ("The Quiet Man: Keanu Reeves Enigma" was the headline), in which he appeared accompanied by names as offshoots of 2000 as Limp Bizkit, Jessica Simpson or Santana. Freaks come and go, but Reeves keeps walking (not aging a single day) and has outlived Kilmer, Dorff, Sheen, Lowe and Slater; seen Downey Jr fall and rise; And he has not lost the north like Depp, he is not as tense to act exclusively in masterpieces like DiCaprio, nor has age given him character as Pitt. He has never been a celebrity despite his family problems and his relationships with Diane Keaton or Jamie Clayton, the transgender actress of Sense 8. It is as if the real world never affected him at all, as if his material possessions were circumstantial, as if Keanu Reeves knew the true meaning of life and what is after death and was keeping it for himself but acting accordingly.
That's why that photograph of him sitting on a bench caught millions of people. For the same reason that the Twitter account Keanu Doing Things ("Keanu doing things") has almost 200,000 followers and why John Wick is already filming its third part. It is a saga about a lonely man (of course) who only speaks to communicate important information and who only hits hosts and shots to do damage and kill. And it has an irrefutable justification: they have killed his puppy. He is a pragmatic hit man who, like Reeves, has nothing to lose because he knows that his best years are in the past (The Matrix will always be the most important film of his life as it is also one of ours and its sequels gave him money not to never having to work again) and that it could go through a series B action for those nostalgic for tuning if it weren't for the Armani surgical precision with which it is shot and for the serenity with which Keanu Reeves says “you're going to die tonight ": It is not a threat, it is a fact.
When the villain explains that “John wasn't exactly the bogeyman, he was the man you sent to kill the fucking bogeyman, I once saw him kill three guys in a bar with a pencil. With a fucking pencil ”generates almost mythological expectations that few actors could satisfy. Keanu Reeves manages to live up to those expectations and give us exactly what we expect but in a surprising way. And he does it one, two and, next year (in John Wick: Parabellum), three times. And when at the end of the first one that villain gives a maniacal fit of laughter, it is not because he thinks he is going to win (he knows he is going to die), but because he cannot help but enjoy watching John Wick in action. The audience, at that moment, understands exactly how you feel.
