River Phoenix's Unfinished Becoming Cannot Be Ranked

The Guardian's ranking of River Phoenix's thirteen films treats his career as a completed work of art, a discrete body we can measure against itself.

Stand By Me sits at the top, necessarily. But the ranking rests on an assumption nobody states because stating it would crack the whole exercise open—that early death doesn't fundamentally alter how we read an actor's roles.

Film criticism has never settled this question. Marilyn Monroe's filmography gets written as a tragedy, her performances inseparable from the fact of her death. The ranking changes because the weight shifts.

But Phoenix gets ranked as if his mortality is a footnote, something that happened to him after the work was finished, the way a car accident might happen to a dentist after his practice was established. He was not finished. He was not practicing—he was becoming. Every role was a choice about what kind of actor he might become. That question hangs over everything he played.

When you watch him in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho or in Dogfight, you are watching a person building something. The building stopped mid-gesture. The real question the ranking obscures is not which film ranks highest but whether we have any language for evaluating work that exists in permanent incompleteness. We lack words for choices made by someone who could not have known they were choosing for all of time.