Reeves career seems back on target with 'Matrix'

Given the performance of Keanu Reeves' last foray into science fiction, 1995's nonsensical cyberflop "Johnny Mnemonic," you'd think that the last thing his hit-starved career needed would be another journey into the land of mystery and imagination.

Reeves did himself no favors in "Mnemonic" by playing a courier who rents out his brain for data-storage, a move which led to widespread sarcasm about the suspected amount of disc-space in Keanu's own noggin ("I only have a 120 gigabyte capacity and I'm uploaded with 320 gigabytes," he confessed bravely at the time).

Apart from maintaining the virtual reality theme's 100 percent record of inspiring really bad movies (a proud unbeaten run stretching from "Tron" to "The Net"), "Johnny Mnemonic" also seemed to confirm that Reeves's gritty role in the bomb-on-a-bus thriller "Speed" had been a fluke and that he had best get back to practicing air guitar with his "Bill and Ted" colleague Alex Winter.

Truth, however, is stranger than fiction -- even nonsensical cyberfiction. Now Reeves finds his career in better shape than ever and his bank account $10 million healthier, thanks to a role in the science-fiction movie "The Matrix." Reeves stars opposite Laurence Fishburne as a man who discovers that our world is an illusion and then leads the rebellion against the massive computer system that controls it.

Directed by brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, the comic-book geeks known for the lesbian noir hit "Bound," "The Matrix" combines the physicality of Hong Kong action movies with manga-cartoon surrealism and a Byzantine plot.

There's not a lot of acting in it. It's a straight-up special effects-laden nerve-twister with a metaphysical core, and its success amounts both to a reversal of fortune and a kind of surrender for Reeves.

It's a capitulation because, more than any other member of the Depp-Slater-Phoenix brigade, with their hippie heritage and fondness for beat poetry and motorbikes, Reeves has always done his best to evince a fashionable distaste for movie stardom. Even his pre-"Speed" profile combined twin streams of amiable airhead fodder (two "Bill and Teds" and an unintentionally comic turn as the vampire hunter Jonathan Harker in "Bram Stoker's Dracula") with the variable-quality art house likes of "My Private Idaho" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."

Confused teenagers were his staple role and critics rhapsodized about his "stillness" and "raw vulnerability," even if it was widely thought that Reeves' real strength was a kind of compelling blankness, a space on to which the audience could project its own hopes and fears. Christian Slater was a little too mean, Johnny Depp too weird and River Phoenix too vapid, but Reeves's very artlessness was his strength.

Reeves was perhaps the quintessential early '90s male star: fey, a bit androgynous and given to acting with his hands. He had exotic, part-Chinese, part-Hawaiian and part-English lineage and a weird name that means "Cool Breeze over the Mountain." Too good-looking by far and not given to dating other movie stars, he was therefore widely assumed to be gay and duly batted away any related questions in politically impeccable fashion.

"There's nothing wrong with being gay, so to deny it is to make a judgment,' " he said. "If someone doesn't want to hire me because I'm gay, well, then I have to deal with it. Otherwise, it's just gossip, isn't it?' "

Such equanimity helped to produce a bizarre rumor, repeated in many newspapers in 1996, that Reeves had secretly married record executive David Geffen; both parties denied it, but Geffen seemed flattered by the idea.

But what Reeves' audiences really seemed to tap into was the fact that, whomever he played and however dim or mangled on drugs they might be, there was some light of decency behind the bewildered face.

Very early in his career, in the 1986 teenage murder saga "River's Edge," he proved he could control a scene and give a kind of moral dimension with the most meager of lines. About to be shot by his nine-year-old brother with a gun stolen from nutcase drug dealer Dennis Hopper, Reeves just says "Come on, man -- I'm your brother," and in doing so sets the tone of the entire movie.

He was great in "Speed" for exactly the same reason. As SWAT officer Jack Traven, trying to save a bus full of commuters from a bomb planted by a madman (Hopper again, of course), he made transparent, frustrated fury all the more believable because he was a little too dumb to look after his own skin. Moments like this were the reason that Reeves didn't sound completely stupid when he observed that Tom Cruise was a movie star whereas he, Keanu, was an actor.

This is a fine and somewhat self-regarding distinction, but Reeves has done his best to maintain it. Since "Speed" hit big in 1994, taking $120 million and piquing adult interest in Cool Breeze, his career decisions have ranged from the brave to the perverse to the commercially suicidal. First, in 1995, he turned down the chance of a prestige appearance opposite Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the L.A. stick-up picture "Heat," preferring to play "Hamlet" in a 789-seat theater in Manitoba instead. It was a conscientious move, but there were to be audience sniggers when the time came for Reeves to describe Yorick as "a fellow of most excellent fancy."

Then, a year later, he rejected a reported $11 million fee to reprise his Jack Traven role in the "Speed" sequel. As it happened, this was a very sensible decision indeed, for when the lumbering "Speed 2" arrived in 1997, it was acclaimed as perhaps the worst sequel of this entire sequel-beset decade.

Reeves' alternative wasn't much better, though. He spent most of 1996 touring Europe, America and Japan with his band, Dogstar, whose music, he conceded, "sucked." (The band performs Tuesday at Boulder Station.) Reeves didn't even sing. He played bass. Dogstar merely provided the opportunity for many monosyllabic interviews in which Reeves apparently confirmed that his talent was best described as instinctive. He's the star, the band is the dog, went the jokes, and Reeves has never since made clear why he's so stubborn in placing himself in such impossible positions.

Mystique hardly covers it; it's like some kind of career death wish, the Jack Traven ideal of sticking with your chosen approach no matter how it may harm you.

Since then his story has been one of no-profile pictures like "The Last Time I Committed Suicide," which makes it all the more surprising that Reeves' asking price has continued to rise.

He will be 35 this year and knows that his potential as a hot young item will wane unless translated into something more lasting.

Can he do it? It's acknowledged that Reeves possessed most of the essentials for a traditional leading man: decency, disarming ineloquence, self-doubt, a hint of recklessness (he has had two serious motorbike crashes) and a weakness for the romantic (while shooting "Chain Reaction," he read Shakespeare to his co-star, Rachel Weisz). "The Devil's Advocate" showed that he can't really do gravitas, but there's no reason why he couldn't carry something like the Brad Pitt role in "Seven" -- perhaps carry it better, because Reeves is equally incapable of carrying off any note of cynicism.

"The Matrix" proves at least that Hollywood believes in his pulling power and that Reeves, for his part, is willing to do what is necessary to keep moving, even as a high-profile punching bag. In "The Matrix," he gets melted, studded with acupuncture needles and beaten senseless.

But as the careers of Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood careers have proved, over the long haul it's not what you can dish out, it's what you can take.

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