After a series of goofy roles Keanu Reeves has gone high-brow, most recently in Little Buddha - but he is still being labelled all brawn and no brains by his critics, says MELISSA MILES.
KEANU Reeves walked up to the table in the crowded restaurant and listened to the conversation. He knew a few of the diners, distinguished film journalists, people in the movie industry. They were talking about spiritual healing and other New Age topics dear to the hearts of Californians. Suddenly, Reeves started making a noise like a cow in pain. Everyone stopped eating and stared at him, but he carried on, mooing loudly, his head thrown back and his eyes shut.
As silence descended across the restaurant, he stopped and said: 'That's my therapy, man. It's a new kind of healing. I always do it when I'm stressed out.' Then he wandered away in search of a stick of celery and a glass of mineral water.
'That really sums up Keanu,' says one of the diners, a Los Angeles-based magazine editor, who recounts the tale with an expression of incomprehension. 'He walks across the room, with his black hair and his surfer's body, and he looks good enough to eat. But then he makes the mistake of opening his mouth. He just sounds like he's walked off the set of a Three Stooges movie.
'Intelligent? Maybe he is, but he hides it well. You just can't shake the feeling that all those gormless characters he's played in his films aren't that far away from home, if you know what I mean.' Reeves lives on a different planet to the rest of the world. He speaks a different language. His thought processes are just as alien. The barriers thrown up by those things leave people baffled as to whether he is a shy genius who hides his intellectual light under a bushel, or just a stupid hunk.
At present, he excites as much heated debate in the movie world as the films of Scorsese or Spielberg. His detractors stifle their laughter long enough to point to his appearance as stiff-collared English vampire hunter Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
