The questionable 2012 movie Joaquin Phoenix wanted nothing to do with
Sibling actors aren’t uncommon in Hollywood, with the likes of Ben and Casey Affleck, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Macaulay and Kieran Culkin all achieving great things over the years, but it might well be that we were denied the pair that could have been the greatest of all time in Joaquin Phoenix and his late brother River.
Joaquin has become the actor that many consider the best working in Hollywood; a four-time Oscar nominee who seems able to elevate any movie he’s in and has put in historic performances in several films, notably Joker, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.
But his elder brother River, who died in 1993 at just 23, was on a similar trajectory before he overdosed on heroin at the Viper Room nightclub in Los Angeles, an event which was witnessed by Joaquin. River had been making movies since the early 1980s, but in the years before his death, he had shown he was going to be a talent to be reckoned with.
He had already achieved box office success with the Rob Reiner-directed Stephen King adaptation Stand by Me in 1986, and then two years later, at 18, he appeared in Sidney Lumet’s drama Running on Empty as the eldest son of a couple on the run after accidentally blinding a man during a nuclear protest. Phoenix picked up both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.
But it was three years later and My Own Private Idaho that brought him the most acclaim, he won the Volpi Cup for ‘Best Actor’ at the Venice Film Festival for his portrayal of a young gay hustler searching for his mother in Gus Van Sant’s powerful drama, and hopes were high for Dark Blood, a thriller that he had spent seven weeks filming in Utah before his lost his life at Johnny Depp’s club.
It was directed by the Dutchman George Sluizer, the man behind the camera on 1988’s The Vanishing, or Spoorloos, which gained notoriety after Stanley Kubrick called it the most terrifying film he had ever seen. Phoenix played a widower in the movie who heads to the desert after his wife dies of radiation poisoning and is picked up by a travelling couple, only for him to turn deadly.
Phoenix hadn’t finished the movie when he died, and so the film missed its planned release date and was eventually abandoned. But Sluizer held on to the footage for almost 20 years, eventually reediting the film and attempting to get River’s younger brother, Joaquin, to overdub some of his missing lines. But despite the director saying he had maintained a good relationship with the Phoenix family, they said that wasn’t the case at all, and they wouldn’t be getting involved.
Eventually, in 2012, after Sluizer had narrated some of the missing lines instead, Dark Blood was released, but to little fanfare and amidst reviews that called it, probably unsurprisingly, ‘fragmented’. Sluizer died just two years later, and Dark Blood proved to be his final film.
Joaquin Phoenix, meanwhile, is unlikely to have a film released this year but is due to start production on Die My Love director Lynne Ramsay’s new movie called Polaris, which is a supernatural horror set in Alaska in the late 1800s.
