ivansxtc:
B+
Exposing the real side of Hollywood and the film industry, the superficial, soulless and corrupt side is like shooting fish in a barrel, and it is getting to be a very tired subject for movies. So either Tolstoy or Bernard Rose (who adapted and directed
ivansxtc from Tolstoy’s book
The Death of Ivan Ilyich) were on to something when they took such a self-assured man, in this case a successful Hollywood agent, and gave him the death sentence of a fatal disease. In
ivansxtc Ivan the agent (Danny Huston) lives the high life of Hollywood despite the modest success of the agency he works for. He is a good looking guy, polite and charming, but he has a few slight weaknesses. As everyone knows even the slightest touch of evil can be exploited in L.A. and Ivan’s weakness, plus his recent success of signing hot actor Don West (Peter Weller) to his agency, leads him to days full of smarmy Hollywood dealings, and nights full of booze, drugs and bimbos.
Somewhere along his path through vague doctor conversations and visits Ivan discovers that he has a rare form of lung cancer. Ivan who is all grins due to his success at his agency is hit like a hammer to the head by the news and he struggles to maintain face in front of his colleagues and his clients. The coupling of low budget digital handheld photography (the film was made for only $500,000) and Mr. Rose’s decision to cast his film with his crew and crew his film with his cast lends to an uneasy sense of realism to the movie and Danny Huston, who looks like Jack Nicholson when he’s grinning and Orson Wells when he is not, truly has the looks of a man who knows he is going to die. But Ivan is no sack, and besides for a few dark, quiet moments of inner contemplation, he has to put on his game face as he dines with his family, and alternately entertaining his girlfriend (Lisa Enos, also the film’s producer and co-writer) and Don West, his new client who has a similar taste in the wild side of life.
In the business he is in Ivan has little time to himself and when he is not sleeping off last night’s party, he generally is drowning himself in Hollywood schmoozing or liquor and drugs. Whether or not Ivan dramatically changes his lifestyle once he learns he is dying is not clear, or maybe not important-the film opens with his co-workers’ bland grumbling reactions upon hearing of his death, then it travels back to when he learns he is dying and chronicles his last couple days-it is implied that Ivan was a heavy drug user and partier before he died and whether he spends his last couple days doing what he has always done or if he is just taking it to a new level is a sad thing to consider. Coupled with Ivan’s gradual, and alarmingly realistic downfall is a frighteningly fitting score of music, especially Wagner’s Vorspiel to
Tristan & Isolde which opens the film (played over a montage of shots of early morning L.A.) and Ivan’s death which elegantly paced with the Liebestod, the “Love Death” scene of the same opera. The music reflects both Ivan’s cultured taste (which illustrates how interesting and intelligent this man could have been, if his body wasn’t infected with the corruption of the industry and the disease that kills him), and it also draws attention to a strong paradox in the film: the music plays up how tragic Ivan’s death is (to himself and the viewer anyway who are the only people who really get to see him suffering when he is alone), but also how typical. Some self-obsessed Hollywood player dies after years of partying: how common, how clichéd is that? Even when Ivan’s co-workers are told he died of cancer they think that it is just a cover story for him overdosing. Ivan’s death and his process of dying are monstrously lonely for the man, and he fills his remaining days with little that has real meaning in his life.
ivansxtc cleverly takes the most redundant subject for a film about Hollywood and turns it upside down by treating an insider’s death with the gravity and the grace it needs to become poignant and meaningful and thus allowing Ivan to transcend his own surroundings.
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