KEANU
ENDEARING CHARACTER CAN BEND FOR SUBSTANTIALLY DIFFERENT ROLES
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
The ambiguity in the characters allows for a personized experience.
Keanu Reeves could be anything onscreen, really, around which the camera creates and recreates a story, a scene and even at times, a character.
The image of a Hollywood icon may be for this reason often more powerful than the message and the acting performance.
In the fourth installment of the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), after everyone has long retired because of deteriorating conditions of the medium, Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, a video game designer struggling with a psychotic break in which he has difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy.
Twenty plus years after the Google search engine and the first installment of the Matrix, everyone involved has a bit of conflict with the way the flesh and blood reality and the digital fantasy has merged and brought humanity along.
The pharmacology Anderson swallows each evening has a bit to do with the tint of the reality into which he awakens.
Reeves used this same ambiguity in the character Point Break (1991). Director Kathryn Bigelow casts Reeves as an undercover police officer infiltrating a California surfing community as part of an investigation into a series of bank robberies.
The film is a groundbreaking production for Bigelow, as a female filmmaker who shows a distinct voice, who also develops Reeves as a supporting character actor who distinguished his screen performance from that of the usual cast of characters available inside Hollywood.
Then, director Francis Ford Coppola cast Reeves in a supporting role in Dracula (1992), starring Gary Oldman in the title character as Dracula, and Winona Ryder as the love interest.
Reeves bends the ambiguity in his character image to the point of slavish naïve whose entire world gets consumed by the Transylvanian Count.
Reeves eventually finds box office gold in a lead role, costarring with Sandra Bulloch and Dennis Hopper in Speed (1994). Speed won Oscars, in an era before digital production technology taking hold of film production, for sound and also for sound effects.
LAPD Detective Jack Tavern must stop a mad bomber seeking to extort a cash ransom from the city. Dennis Hopper plays Howard Payne, a former police officer, having moved to the city to collect his pension bonus.
The bombing plot accelerates through a sequence of trial and error bombing attempts until an entire public bus full of civilian passengers is put in jeopardy. Director Jan de Bont creates suspense with a bomb stuck to the underside of the chassis of the bus that may or may not explode by remote control, but may just as well also explode automatically, if the bus goes below a 50 mile per hour speed on a congested Los Angeles freeway system.
Reeves and Bulloch have undeniable screen chemistry together, particularly playing characters in polar opposite to the brooding angry homicidal maniac, created by Hopper.
This proven bankability as a lead marquee name lands Reeves roles with Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate (1997) in which Reeves plays a young naïve lawyer drawn into the nasty backroom game of lawyering.
Reeves ultimately lands the lead role in the Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) a blockbuster performance that would define his image as well as his film career.
The trilogy with a continuous story has an ensemble cast of interesting character actors that include Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, Carie-Anne Moss as Trinity, and Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith.
Neo, played by Reeves, is recruited into the rebellion fleet of free thinking individuals fighting authoritarian conservatives in the dark web.
The police and the deep cover agent operatives personify the machines spreading hegemony across the planet, while spending a lot of resources fighting off the rebellion.
Morpheus commands the rebel fighter ship Nebuchadnezzar, directing the insurgence into the digital universe while maintaining defiant anti-authoritarian stances even within his own rebellious hierarchy. Fishburne creates the best form of leadership with Morpheus mentoring Neo until Neo can fulfil the prophecy and destroy the machines.
Reeves’ character is interesting and complicated enough to inspire many personal meanings, while also defining the truth as seen by any particular individual.
The Matrix has all the intrigue and complicated plot twists of a Shakespearian-esc drama, presenting as a digital opera with an updated version of the internal personal struggles, military battles and the complicated clashes of humanity of the 21st Century e-universe.
An early infatuation with Shakespeare gets the better of Reeves as he simultaneously presents as a compassionate love interest and as an efficient, prolific assassin.
This double entendre of the screen character continually shifts back and forth, throughout Reeves’ film career, as an ambiguity that morphs from the blockbuster action hero to the romantic love interest of mainstream media to the tidy professional.
This definition finds meaning on the outskirts of society in the authentic portrayal of fragmented marginalized individuals, such as in the role of the gay street hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991). Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meet Mike and Scott.
River Phoenix costars in a gritty portrayal of gay prostitutes learning to survive on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Director Gus Van Sant produces this independent film production that becomes a bit of a cult favorite in that the film projects a sympathetic portrait of the marginalized.
Mike and Scott find themselves hustling in Rome, Italy. But everything comes to an end, when Scott, played by Reeves, finds true love and marries his love interest, leaving Mike without emotional support in a dangerous lifestyle.
All the more impressive is the ability to cash in on the double entendre within the same production cycle. Reeves us cast as Scott in My Own Private Idaho, at the same time appearing as Johnny in Point Break, and then as Jonathan in Dracula.
A few years later, Reeves finds himself cast as a United States military soldier returning from the war only to finds his wife not so loyal, but then, when he decides to move on, he helps out a woman pregnant out of wedlock in A Walk in the Clouds (1995).
Paul agrees to pose as Victoria’s husband when she returns to the family home, after serendipity brings the two characters together. Reeves shows the gentle compassionate side of his screen character whom no one can really dislike – a veteran still with enough compassion for humanity to help out a not so innocent woman.
This bending of the actor’s image culminates in the Matrix role where the character becomes three dimensional in a complicated plot with three parallel narratives.
The gentle side of the ambiguity allows the audience to stay attached to the character even when watching the cool decisive action of a killer.
The Matrix Trilogy is filled with violent, mixed martial art fight scenes that take up a lot of the runtime. The attachment to the screen character is maintained by an endearing layer focused on the gentle humanity everyone desires, despite the authoritarian-defiant nature of the action.
Before discovering Shakespeare, Reeves’ preoccupation with the Bruce Lee double feature, instead of doing homework as a young teenager, provides a useful backdrop to the jujitsu like moves required of Neo in the Matrix.
An added layer of complexity occurs as the film merges the science fiction genre, with romance, horror and high tech at a time when the e-universe and the Internet had just begun to aggressively compete for an audience – including a dark web filled with privacy violations and morality crimes.
The franchise though is not didactic with a message for Internet users as much as a transcendental attempt to make a statement about the new struggle humanity faces.
Reeves pulls in viewers endeared to him to question outcomes without telling them how to think and what to decide.
This screen character welcomes the escapism of movies and digital entertainment by inviting all of humanity to simultaneously attach itself, recreate and progress.
Keanu Reeves: An Excellent Adventure, by Brian J. Robb, London, Plexus, 2003.
Matrix Warrior: Being the One, by Jake Horsley, New York, Thomas Dunne Books, 2003.