"Dark Blood": Death and the Maiden

At the end of October it will be twenty years ago that River Phoenix died of cardiac arrest caused by a drug overdose outside The Viper Room club in LA. He was just twenty-three years old. He had given one major performance already, as the vulnerable narcoleptic male prostitute in Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho"(1991), and several others, like his Marine in Nancy Savoca's "Dogfight" (1991) and his son of political radicals in Sidney Lumet's "Running on Empty" (1988), that showed promise and inventiveness. Even as a child actor, Phoenix was never winsome or ingratiating. He had a wary, dismayed, adult face, and a rather blunt way with emotions. He did not smile easily. And he seemed to have things on his mind that he could not share or speak about.

At the time of his death, Phoenix had shot around eighty percent of "Dark Blood," a drama set in the Utah desert co-starring Judy Davis and Jonathan Pryce and directed by George Sluizer, and he had gone back to Los Angeles to film the rest of the interior scenes for the movie when he died that night outside The Viper Room. It had been a contentious shoot where Sluizer and Davis had taken an instant dislike to each other and were vocal about their mutual displeasure. Davis had told Sluizer that she needed to protect her sensitive skin from the sun with a large hat, and he curtly agreed to this, but then this limitation upset him as they shot. "It's important to know what your strengths are," Davis said in an interview for "Premiere" magazine in 1993. "I absolutely believe in my intuition; I think that's a great asset to an actor. The weaknesses in my personality are impatience and sometimes intolerance. Which came out with this guy George. I was very quickly, utterly intolerant of him. I decided that he was dangerous, and kept away from him."

Sluizer's reconstructed "Dark Blood" has traveled to various film festivals, but there are still legal issues to be worked out if it is to be shown for a paying audience. It runs eighty-six minutes, and it has a clear beginning, middle and end. What's missing are several key scenes between Phoenix's character, known only as Boy, and Davis's character, a former Playboy Bunny named Buffy. The film might work in a cryptic way without Sluizer's narration, but his voice on the track winds up being effectively suggestive. We have to fill in the gaps in the narrative ourselves, and so what might have been an iffy psychological triangle thriller in the "Knife in the Water" (1962) manner becomes something else, something predicated on incompleteness.

There are a couple of howlers in the dialogue, most of which are delivered in Sluizer's narration. The script (written by Jim Barton, who has not worked much since) features the kind of on-the-nose lines that might have been played outright for humor or might just have been skirted over by these three outstanding actors, all of whom were working at a very high level. Davis is at her considerable best in the film's mid-section, a guarded woman letting her guard down, quieting her mannerisms and settling into many distinctive moods of shy yearning with Pryce and treating Phoenix with an unusual kind of tough-love tenderness.

Phoenix's Boy has created a candlelit fall-out shelter for the apocalypse he feels is coming, and he wants to share it with Buffy. Davis and Phoenix play out one intimate scene where she is stoned on drugs and he is telling her about the shelter, and in this brief interaction you can see two large talents working hard to reach each other. Unfortunately, most of the really important scenes between their characters had yet to be filmed. Phoenix had asked Sluizer to put them off because they were the hardest to do, and he wanted to get more comfortable with Davis. "The Monday after River died we all went on the set and we were asked to form a large circle," Davis said. "George gave his speech about River—it was true what he said, he was a lovely boy. And then Jonathan Pryce asked us to join hands and wish River's spirit a happy journey as it went across…And I felt very uncomfortable with all that. I didn't want to hold hands, I don't believe in spirits passing. But I didn't have a choice, so I wished that I'd not gone to the studio. I don't like to be forced to be dishonest."

Phoenix was so vulnerable, a poster boy for vulnerability, even, a '90s icon, but he also had some of Davis's harshness, and it comes out when Boy leans back and dies. This is one of the most realistic death scenes I have ever seen: his eyes and mouth open and you can see and feel when the life has left him, as if his face is just an empty envelope left on that bed. This is what someone looks like when they die, and no other actor has come as close to imagining it as Phoenix does here, in one of the last scenes he ever shot.