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Biography
Few film stars, and very few who earn $15
million per movie, have suffered as many critical batterings as Keanu
Reeves. They've usually been fierce, too, contending that Reeves is so
wooden, so expressionless that he must rank amongst the worst actors in
Hollywood. It seems so unfair.
After all, he first broke through playing
a succession of alienated teenagers, culminating with the arch dumbo Ted
"Theodore" Logan in Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure. You
have to think that the opinions of Reeves' critics are based more on his
characters than his performances. They think he's some blockheaded
Valley Boy who struck gold - in fact, he's not even American.
Add to this the rest of his CV. Reeves has worked with many of cinema's
finest directors - Bertolucci, Coppola, Kenneth Branagh, Gus Van Sant,
Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, Stephen Frears, not to mention action
greats like Kathryn Bigelow, Andrew Davis and Jan De Bont. He's acted
alongside Al
Pacino, Cate Blanchett, Gene Hackman, Denzel
Washington, Anthony
Hopkins, William Hurt, John
Malkovich, Glenn Close, Dianne Wiest. If he was as bad as some say,
how could he ever have built up a list like this? And if your answer to
that question is "Well, he's good-looking, isn't he?" you
clearly haven't been watching his progress. The guy works hard, he's
taken risks right from the start, and he's delivered some startling
performances along the way. Read on, and judge for yourself.
He was born Keanu Charles Reeves on the 2nd of September, 1964, in
Beirut. His father Samuel Nowlin Reeves, a part-Chinese part-Hawaiian
geologist had married English showgirl Patricia Taylor there, the couple
having met after he'd seen her performing at a nightclub. His name,
Keanu, is Hawaiian for "cool breeze over the mountains". Well,
literally-speaking it means "the coolness", but the fancy
extension is forgivable. We all need a little more poetry in our lives,
don't we?
His parents' marriage would not last for
long. Within a couple of years of Keanu's birth, they'd moved to
Australia, had a daughter (Kim) and divorced. Samuel would return to
Hawaii, while Patricia would take the kids to New York. Here she would
meet and marry the stage and film director Paul Aaron (he'd later direct
Chuck Norris in Force Of One and Glenn Close in Maxie), who'd shift the
family to Toronto, where they'd all take Canadian citizenship. Sadly,
this marriage wouldn't last either, with Patricia later marrying rock
promoter Robert Miller, who'd give Keanu a half-sister, Karina. He'd
also help Patricia into a new career as a costume designer for pop stars
such as David Bowie and Dolly Parton. Later still would come fourth
husband Jack Bond, owner of a hair salon, though she'd divorce him, too,
in 1994.
Growing up in the bohemian section of Toronto, Keanu spent the years
between kindergarten and 8th Grade at Jesse Ketchum Public School. After
that, things became a little more complicated. Not keen on academic
pursuits, he much preferred sports to lessons, particularly ice hockey.
Excelling as goalkeeper, he became known as "The Wall" and
would be voted his school's MVP. His various stepfathers would make his
upbringing more interesting than the norm - the young Keanu would attend
Jewish summer camp and wrestle with Alice Cooper.
There'd also be Drama. As said, Keanu was not a happy bunny in class.
Teachers would recall him forever forgetting his books or homework. When
called up on it, he'd just smile and go fetch them. Indeed later, with
his usual self-deprecation, he'd jokingly comment "I'm a meat-head
man. You've got smart people and you've got dumb people. I just happen
to be dumb". Instead, he found true pleasure in the adrenaline of
live performance. By 14, he'd already decided on a theatrical career,
and began to seek work in adverts and shows on Canadian TV. In 1979, he
made his professional acting debut in Hanging In, a comedy set in a
youth counselling centre. He played a tough street kid, his first line
on screen being "Hey, lady, can I use the shower?"
By the next year he'd also scored a high-profile part dancing in a Coke
ad. The company would employ him again in 1983 when he played a
youngster whose disappointment at losing a bike race is tempered when
his beloved father hands him a Coke. There'd also be an appearance on
behalf of Kellogg's. Laying out a long breakfast table, Keanu would set
out boxes of corn flakes then, overcome by temptation, would pour
himself a bowl and eat them with near-orgasmic delight. This would be
his first major paycheque.
Of course, this career would not make
normal classes any more interesting for the young boy and he'd attend no
fewer than four different High Schools, including La Salle and the
Toronto School for the Performing Arts. Finally dropping out at 17, he
began to pursue a theatrical career in earnest, supporting himself by
sharpening ice skates and working as a pasta chef and tree cutter.
He made his stage debut proper in a
workshop production called For Adults Only, based on the real-life
abduction of young women in Toronto. Next came another student show when
he played a preppy fellow in Holding Someone Holding Me, a production
put on in a converted downtown morgue. There'd also be a minor
production of The Crucible, he'd play Mercutio in Romeo And Juliet and
he'd co-host one season of kids' show Going Great, alongside Megan
Follows, who'd later score an ongoing TV hit as Anne of Green Gables.
1984 brought a breakthrough of sorts. After appearing once more as a
young thug in Night Heat, and yet again in The Prodigal, he took on a
play called Wolfboy at Toronto's Passe Muraille Theatre. Here he played
suicidal teenager, Bernie, who's sent to a psychiatric hospital where
he's seduced by a disturbed male prostitute who thinks he's a wolf. The
play caused a major stir with its homoerotic content (including an oiled
Keanu doing press-ups in his boxer shorts), and would win Reeves his
Equity card.
Now his two obsessions - acting and hockey - combined to present an
international screen debut. This was in Youngblood, where Rob Lowe
played a farm boy who dreams of making it in the Canadian hockey leagues
- Keanu appearing as Heaver, a member of the team he tries to join, a
team also featuring Patrick Swayze.
At last he was ready for his assault on the big-time. In his old Volvo
he took off for Hollywood, with $3000 and Paul Aaron's address in his
pocket. Though an agent would persuade him to briefly change his name to
the less-exotic KC, work would come quickly. And not just any work, as
Reeves would make his American film debut in one of the most important
movies of the Eighties - River's Edge (he'd made his US TV debut in a
failed pilot called Fast Food).
This was directed by Tim Hunter, who'd
earlier written Over The Edge, a study of punky alienation featuring a
pumping contemporary soundtrack and starring Matt Dillon. River's Edge
used many of the same tactics but was a much bleaker piece. Here a bunch
of slacker school kids discover that one of their number, Samson (Daniel
Roebuck) has killed his girlfriend and left her body lying beside the
river. Of course, they should call the police, but denim-clad Keanu, his
responsible girlfriend Ione Skye and the rest are all persuaded by
Crispin Glover's Layne to try to save Samson. Thus, as Layne screams
around listening to Slayer in his battered motor and enlisting the help
of local freak Dennis Hopper, they're all dragged deeper and deeper into
the mess.
Many found the kids' split loyalties and
amoral disinterest to be deeply disturbing, and River's Edge - arriving
slap-bang in the middle of America's slacker movement - became a major
Gen X cult hit. Everyone involved was now hot property and Keanu would
appear on screen eight times in 1986. Most of this was TV movie work,
but it was good and varied. He had a brief role in Act Of Vengeance
where Charles Bronson played a miner battling corruption within his
union in 1969. Young Again, a forerunner of Tom
Hanks' Big, saw 40-year-old businessman Robert Urich magically
granted his one wish - to be 17 once more - and transformed into Keanu.
Under The Influence concerned a family ravaged by a father's alcoholism,
Keanu playing the younger son, dabbling with drink but pulling away
before he follows dad Andy Griffith down the slippery slope.
Next came a remake of Babes In Toyland where Drew
Barrymore, forced to look after her siblings and losing her
innocence too soon, suffers an accident and finds herself in Toyland and
(helped by Keanu's Jack-Be-Nimble) tries to save Mary Contrary from a
disastrous marriage to evil-hearted Barnaby Barnacle. Mary would be
played by Jill Schoelen, with whom Keanu would become romantically
involved. She'd later be briefly engaged to Brad
Pitt.
Then there would be Flying, where he played a goofy schoolboy outsider,
keen to get it together with Olivia D'Abo, a girl attempting to overcome
a knee injury and make it onto the gym team. And 1986 would end with
Keanu starring alongside Kiefer Sutherland and Billy Zane in Brotherhood
Of Justice. Here he was a school kid who, along with others sick of the
drugs and violence around them, forms a secret vigilante gang that
rapidly goes out of control.
River's Edge had given him a foothold in cinema, despite his turning
down the Charlie Sheen role in Platoon due to the excessive violence,
and 1988 saw him steady his position. In the wacky teen comedy The Night
Before he starred as goofy Winston Connelly, a school geek who, due to a
bet gone wrong, finds himself taking stuck-up pretty girl Lori Loughlin
(who'd earlier appeared in Brotherhood Of Justice) to the prom.
Unfortunately, he gets drunk and involved with pimps, and loses his
wallet, his girl and his dad's car.
Light years away from this was Permanent Record where a scholarship
winning high school kid with everything going for him decides to jump
off a cliff. Everyone is naturally mystified and traumatised, Keanu
standing out as a friend who was learning guitar from the dead man. The
scene where - drunk, furious and wracked with guilt - he confronts the
suicide's brother and father was especially moving, and proof positive
that Reeves was an actor of considerable potential. He continued the
disturbed teen theme with comedy The Prince Of Pennsylvania where,
having witnessed mum Bonnie Bedelia cheating on his dreamer dad Fred
Ward, he gets embroiled in a plot to kidnap Ward with kooky older woman
Amy Madigan.
Now he moved up a gear by appearing as
Chevalier Danceny in Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons. An epic of
deceit and desire, this saw Glenn Close and John
Malkovich as decadent French aristocrats playing ruinous games with
sex and psychology. When Close persuades Malkovich to seduce virginal Uma
Thurman to get back at an ex-lover about to marry the young girl,
she adds interest by introducing impoverished music teacher Danceny to
the fray. But disaster looms when Malkovich does the unthinkable and
falls in love with Michelle
Pfeiffer, another of his victims. An infuriated Close then sets in
motion a string of events leading to a deadly dual between Keanu and
Malkovich.
Dangerous Liaisons showed Keanu's determination to succeed as a
"serious" actor as, to make it, he turned down the lead in The
Fly 2 and took a 90% paycut. It also began a string of major hits for
Reeves. Next came Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure, the teen comedy
that, despite the variety of his roles thus far, would seal his
reputation for years to come. Here Keanu played Ted "Theodore"
Logan, son of a police chief in the valley and best friend of Alex
Winter's Bill S. Preston Esquire. The boys are a dopey pair, far more
interested in bodacious babes and heavy metal than schoolwork and are
appalled when Ted's father threatens to send his son to military academy
if they don't pass their upcoming history exam, for which they must
deliver an A-graded presentation. Fortunately, they're visited by Rufus,
a fellow from the future, who lends them his time-travelling
phone-booth, allowing them to round up the likes of Billy The Kid,
Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon and Beethoven and bring them back to
present-day San Dimas, along with some "historical babes".
Bill And Ted was a wacky classic, a cross between Time Bandits and
Wayne's World. Brilliantly written and performed, it was a huge hit that
launched a long (and increasingly awful) succession of California teen
comedies. Reeves moved on to Ron Howard's Parenthood, a feel-good comedy
involving the extended family of couple Steve Martin and Mary
Steenburgen and their problems with kids of all ages. Once more Keanu
delivered a spot-on performance as Tod Hawkes, a drag-racing slacker who
marries the teenage daughter of Martin's sister Dianne Wiest. She's
naturally horrified - until Reeves proves to be a helpful male influence
on her "weird" young son, Joaquin Phoenix.
Now able to alternate between big budget movies and artier fare, Keanu
continued on his learning curve with some courage. Having returned to
the stage to perform in The Tempest, he appeared in an American
Playhouse production of Life Under Water, as a disaffected teen who runs
away from home and moves in with two girls, one being Sarah Jessica
Parker. Though in his mid-twenties, his face and by-now expert
mannerisms still allowed him to play a moody adolescent with some aplomb
- but this, aside from the inevitable Bill And Ted sequel, would be the
last time he did it.
It wasn't just his age that brought about
this change. Having been acting for over a decade, Reeves was not happy
to find himself cast in the minds of many as a mopey, lunkheaded teen.
Many, in fact, believed that the success of Bill and Ted was partly down
to Keanu and Alex Winter simply playing themselves. "I used to have
nightmares", said Reeves later "that they would put %u2018He
played Ted' on my tombstone". To break the pattern, he strove to
vary his roles so drastically no one could deny his efforts.
He began with two black comedies. First, I Love You To Death. Here
Tracey Ullman wants to off her cheating husband Kevin Kline, and gets
gofer River Phoenix to hire a hit man. Unfortunately, he engages
bumbling, bungling dopehead brothers Keanu and William Hurt who proceed
to hilariously mess everything up. After this came Aunt Julia And The
Scriptwriter where Keanu played a radio station employee who engages in
an affair with long-lost aunt Barbara Hershey only to find radio
dramatist Peter Falk writing about their lives in his popular soap
opera. Things get double-weird when Falk starts to predict the future.
Reeves is actually seen by many these days as a bona fide action star
but, strangely, he's only ever made four such pictures (not including
Matrix sequels). It's just that three of them were such enormous hits.
The first of these came now, in 1991, with Point Break. Directed by
Kathryn "Near Dark" Bigelow, this saw Keanu as FBI agent
Johnny Utah, infiltrating an extreme sports gang suspecting of armed
robbery. Head of the gang is Bodhi, played by Patrick Swayze (Keanu's
Youngblood co-star) who, it turns out, is stealing money to fund his
quest for spiritual enlightenment. Thus the film became a neat
combination of cod philosophy and some of the most stirring action
sequences ever shot. The skydiving scenes in particular were stunning
and surely brought about the making of both Drop Zone and Terminal
Velocity.
A drop in pace was inevitable. After a spot as James Dean in Paula
Abdul's Rush Rush video came a Bill And Ted sequel with some wonderfully
amusing passages, including a Seventh Seal spoof that saw the hapless
duo playing Twister with Death. Then came a massive turnaround as Reeves
subverted his action hero/ Valley boy persona with Gus Van Sant's My Own
Private Idaho. This took him right back to his pro stage debut in
Wolfboy, with Keanu and River Phoenix playing young male prostitutes in
an exhilarating rewrite of Shakespeare's Henry IV. It was slow and arty,
but also dreamy and mesmerising, a treatise on "the ridiculousness
of experience".
Having spent a while being menaced by
Gary Oldman and rolling around with semi-clad vampires in Francis Ford
Coppola's Dracula, Reeves moved on to more Shakespeare with Kenneth
Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. Here, as the baleful Don John trying
to destroy the sweet affair between Kate
Beckinsale and Robert Sean Leonard, he revealed an impressive
meanness that would later be exhibited in all its black glory in The
Gift.
After brief cameos in Alex Winter's crazy comedy Freaked (as Ortiz the
Dog Boy) and Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Keanu continued
to widen his experience by taking on Bertolucci's Little Buddha. Here a
Seattle family are told that their son may be the reincarnation of a
revered Buddhist monk, the story being intercut with the ancient tale of
Prince Siddharta's passage to enlightenment and emergence as the Buddha
- Keanu doing sterling work as the passive but spiritually ambitious
Prince.
Next came his second big action hit, Speed, where he played Jack Traven,
a bomb squad cop chasing maniac Dennis Hopper (earlier a maniac in
Keanu's breakthrough River's Edge). Though the part had been turned down
by Tom
Cruise, Bruce
Willis, Tom
Hanks, Johnny
Depp and even William and Stephen Baldwin, Reeves saw something in
it, and how right he was. With Sandra
Bullock driving a bus that will explode if it drops below 50mph, it
was a superior thriller and a massive money-maker.
Sadly, unlike Point Break, Speed did not launch Reeves into a period of
particularly interesting work. Indeed, it was Failure Time. First came
Johnny Mnemonic, written by William "Neuromancer" Gibson,
where Keanu played a courier with a hard-drive in his head, a hard-drive
carrying vital information that will kill him if it's not downloaded
quickly. It was a great idea, there was a cool cast including Ice-T,
Henry Rollins and Beat Takeshi, but it failed to hit midway on the
Thrillometer. His next action attempt, too, wouldn't hit the mark. In
Chain Reaction, he and Rachel
Weisz played researchers on a project that discovers a cheap,
pollution-free fuel. Bad news for many powers-that-be. And so they find
themselves framed for murder and pursued relentlessly by just about
everyone.
At this stage even his indie efforts weren't really up to scratch. The
sappy romance A Walk In The Clouds saw him as an unhappily married man
who decides to help a pregnant Mexican girl by pretending to be her
husband. The grungey, sleazy Feeling Minnesota had him running off with
his manipulative brother's wife (Cameron
Diaz) and being tailed by a private dick. Then came the Beat
Generation drama The Last Time I Committed Suicide where he played Neal
Cassady's drunken, pool-playing buddy. It was all good practice, but
generally half-baked stuff.
After three years without a hit, many
would have taken the easy option and reprised an earlier success. But,
unlike Sandra
Bullock, Keanu now turned down Speed 2 (he'd earlier nixed the Val
Kilmer part in Heat to play Hamlet onstage - what does that say about
his thespian ambitions?) and instead took on Al
Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, originally to have starred Brad
Pitt. Here Keanu played a sharp Florida lawyer headhunted by
Pacino's New York firm and gradually drawn into a life of vanity and
greed, all the while ignoring his young wife Charlize
Theron, who tries to persuade him to return south, then begins to
see visions and turns suicidal. Pacino, meanwhile, is turning out to be
something far worse than a mere lawyer. It was a tough part for Reeves.
Not only did he have to engage in some harrowing emotional scenes with
Theron, but also had to face Pacino at his most flamboyant. He managed
both.
The following year, 1998, saw Reeves take a cameo in the indie feminist
road movie Me And Will. This time, though, he was appearing with his
band, Dogstar. This was an outfit he'd formed in 1993 with Bret Domrose
and Robert Mailhouse, Keanu providing bass. They'd put out an album, Our
Little Visionary, in 1996, and would release a follow-up, Happy Ending,
in 2000. And this was no scrappy ego-trip, either. At one point the band
would actually support Bon Jovi.
The rest of 1998 was spent preparing for and filming what would be one
of 1999's biggest hits - The Matrix. Keanu took the lead after Ewan
McGregor and Will
Smith turned it down - Keanu not having enjoyed a hit since Speed
five years before - and, as if to prove his worth, threw himself into
the work, spending four months learning martial arts. The movie had him
as Thomas A. Anderson, a software author who's a hacker on the sly.
Recruited by cyber rebels led by Laurence Fishburne, he discovers that
the whole world is just a virtual reality designed to keep people
obedient to the system. And he, as his alter-ego Neo, is The One, the
messiah who must defeat the evil Agents and save humanity.
The Matrix was a special-effects spectacular, particularly impressive in
its "bullet-time" sequences where Keanu literally bent over
backwards to avoid being shot. And, as said, despite its non-bankable
star, it was a huge hit. Costing $60 million to make, it took in $73
million in its first two weeks. Keanu would take $10 million for his
involvement, plus an incredible $35 million box office percentage.
But 1999 wasn't all good for Keanu. At
Christmas, his longtime girlfriend Jennifer Syme (a former assistant to
David Lynch who'd appeared as Junkie Girl in Lost Highway) produced a
stillborn baby girl. And this was not the end of the tragedy. In 2001,
while estranged from Reeves, Syme was killed when her Cherokee jeep
crashed on LA's Highway 101, flipping over and sending Jennifer through
the windscreen. Keanu would stay close to her mother, helping her out
financially in a virulent legal dispute with neighbors.
After The Matrix, Keanu went back into
training for sports comedy The Replacements, this time learning to be a
football quarterback. Based on the 1987 players' strike, the movie had
Gene Hackman as a coach who must put together a pick-up side to keep the
season going. Naturally, he can only find loose cannon Keanu and a gang
of untrustworthy misfits. It was a reasonable effort and once more
proved Reeves' commitment to his craft - he actually took a big drop in
his fee so Hackman could be hired. After all, everyone can learn a thing
or two from Gene Hackman.
Now Keanu had the good sense to revisit the dark places he explored to
such effect in Much Ado About Nothing. In The Watcher, he played a
serial killer who sends cop James Spader into a breakdown, then follows
him from LA to Chicago to continue the bad work. It was interesting
stuff in that Reeves' killer needed his pursuer so badly, but it
actually wasn't a film that Keanu wanted to make. Once he had fulfilled
his contract (and kept his mouth shut for the legally required period),
he revealed that he'd agreed to make the movie for scale as the part was
small and fascinating. But then the part was enlarged and Reeves found
himself being paid millions less than co-stars Spader and Marisa Tomei.
Beyond this, he claimed that it was actually a friend of his who'd
signed the contract, forging Reeves' signature. Unfortunately, fearing
the same kind of trouble Kim Basinger suffered when she pulled out of
Boxing Helena, he just had to go through with it.
No worries - his next picture was genuinely excellent. In The Gift,
written by Billy
Bob Thornton and directed by Sam Raimi, Cate Blanchett played a
card-reader and wise country woman who gives good and kind advice to the
locals, including Hilary
Swank who's getting badly beaten by husband Keanu. When she advises
Swank to leave him, he threatens her and her children and it all gets
worse when country club girl Katie
Holmes is murdered and Blanchett "sees" the body in
Reeves' pond. The film was packed with fine performances, especially
from Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi, but Reeves outshone them all. His
Donnie Barksdale was cruel and vicious, but far from a one-dimensional
villain. Reeves had actually visited counsellors to understand the
abusive character, and had spent three weeks driving around Georgia.
Really, the performance could easily have been Oscar-nominated.
Keanu's roller coaster career continued
with Sweet November, a remake of a 1968 Sandy Dennis vehicle. Here he
was reunited with Charlize
Theron when he played a hard-nosed ad-man picked up by a bohemian
girl who, it turns out, takes men into her life for a single month in
order to improve them. It sounds kooky, it sounds romantic, but in fact
it was nauseatingly sentimental, particularly when Theron is found to be
dying. Better was Hardball, where Reeves played a gambler and drinker in
need of money fast. A friend loans it to him, as long as he agrees to
coach a team of dysfunctional kids in the Chicago Housing Authority
baseball league. Amazingly, given the movie's predictability, it
actually went to Number One for two weeks.
So now Keanu was hitting top spot with even his smaller movies. Yet once
again the good news would be balanced by bad. Not only was Jennifer
Symes killed, but Aaliyah
too, one of his co-stars in the upcoming Matrix sequel. Then he almost
died himself when, on a demon ride (no lights) through Topanga Canyon,
he hit the mountain side, broke several ribs and ruptured his spleen.
When he was on the stretcher, one paramedic let one end drop to the
ground. "It made me laugh", said Keanu later "but I
couldn't breathe".
Then there was the family. For a while Keanu's father had being trying
to get in touch. He hadn't seen his son in 25 years and claimed to be
living on food stamps with Keanu's grandmother. Keanu remained unmoved.
After all, it had been 25 years and, beyond this, in 1992 Samuel had
been jailed for ten years for selling heroin (he served two). Then there
was his sister Kim. Diagnosed with leukaemia years before, now her
condition worsened. In December 2002, Keanu would leave the set of The
Matrix to take her to Hawaii, keeping her in absolute luxury.
And now came The Matrix sequel. Indeed, two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded
and The Matrix Revolutions having been filmed back to back. Having given
up a payment of around $38 million to get the movies made (one battle
sequence alone cost $40 million), Keanu returned as Neo, now with only
72 hours to prevent 250,000 probes from discovering Zion and destroying
the last human city. Both released in 2003, the Matrix movies would be
enormo-hits, even by Reeves extraordinary standards. And now his
decision to take a percentage cut instead of an upfront fee really paid
off. Conservative estimates claimed he made at least $206 million from
the Matrix trilogy, maybe as much as $330 million. At this point, he was
the highest-paid actor in the world.
Following Matrix 2 and 3, he ended 2003
in a very different movie, Something's Gotta Give. This saw Jack
Nicholson as an aging music biz Lothario who's dating a far younger
Amanda Peet. She takes him for a romantic weekend at the Hamptons home
of her playwright mother Diane Keaton, only to find mum's actually
there. Nicholson has a long-overdue heart attack and is rushed to
hospital, where he's seen by straight-laced and caring doctor Keanu. And
now the complications begin, as Reeves gets the hots for Keaton, who in
turn begins to fall for the now-vulnerable Nicholson. Usually, it's easy
to see why women would fall for Nicholson, but this time, with Keanu so
moral, so charming, so gallant, the competition would be stiff in more
ways than one.
Having begun a relationship with actress Autumn Macintosh (rekindling
the sparks of a brief fling in the early Nineties) and been awarded a
star on Hollywood's Walk Of Fame, Keanu reappeared on our screens in
2005 in two wildly varying productions. First came Thumbsucker, a
resolutely indie piece featuring a teenager who, as the title suggests,
still sucks his thumb - for comfort and as an aid to concentration. His
father, naturally, disapproves of this shameful sissiness and so the boy
is sent to Keanu, in a comic turn as an orthodontist-come-New Age guru,
who offers to hypnotize him but wonders what it will cost the boy.
Meanwhile, mum Tilda Swinton is kicking on with work at a celebrity
rehab center that's just admitted Benjamin Bratt. The movie was clearly
destined for major cult status.
A world away from cultdom would be the blockbuster Constantine, which
would see Reeves remain with Tilda Swinton and also reunite with Rachel
Weisz for the first time since Chain Reaction. Based on the comic
book Hellblazer, this would see Keanu as the chain-smoking, depressive
supernatural detective John Constantine, a man who can see the angels
and demons who walk among us. He's got lung cancer, he's doomed to Hell
for an earlier suicide attempt (he's actually already been there once)
and must win his place in Heaven by battling against evil, here teaming
up with LA cop Weisz in an adventure involving the Spear of Destiny (the
one they stabbed Jesus with) and the Devil Himself. Reeves, familiar
with this territory after the Matrix, made Constantine deliberately,
manically morose, as befitted a man in his position, and it was perhaps
the film's darkness that prevented it becoming the mega-hit its $100
million budget demanded.
Now the man to call for sci-fi epics, 2006 would see Reeves in A Scanner
Darkly, written by Philip K Dick and directed by Richard Linklater. This
would be even darker than Constantine, with Keanu inhabiting a future
world where the war against drugs has been lost. Thus, though working as
an undercover cop, he's also addicted to Substance D, a drug that causes
its users to suffer split personality disorders. And so Keanu's chasing
a notorious dealer who is, in fact, Keanu as well. With state-of-the-art
animation, an intense feeling of paranoia and the warped hallucingenics
of a bad trip, the movie would bravely attempt to match such Dick
adaptations as Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall.
With rumours abounding that he'd now star
in The Night Watchman, written by James Ellroy and directed by Spike
Lee, where a cop accused of corruption fights for redemption, Reeves
instead stepped back into romantic comedy with Il Mare. This, a remake
of the 2000 South Korean hit Siworae, would see Keanu reunite with Speed
queen Sandra
Bullock, to play people living in the same place in different eras
who begin to communicate and fall in love via a magical mail-box.
Having proved that he's both an eminently bankable action star and,
after Constantine and Something's Gotta Give, a fine actor of wide
scope, Keanu Reeves is sitting pretty. Still living in Toronto (he's
never taken American citizenship), he shuns the limelight, preferring
instead to surf, ballroom dance, and ride both horses and his beloved
Norton Combat Commando. He works hard and is always self-deprecating,
once being quoted as saying "I'm sorry my existence is not very
noble or sublime". He wasn't quite right in that. Given his refusal
to play the star-game, his obvious efforts at self-improvement and a
growing string of fine performances, the man has a nobility all of his
own.~ Dominic Wills
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