Look, I know the title is naff but leave that thought at the door before you take your seat and what you�re left with is a powerful, insightful, and thought-provoking 93 minutes. Based loosely around the Tolstoy novel �The Death of Ivan Ilyich�, this film is very bitter; it�s scathing portrait of the Hollywood machine is enormously hostile and almost completely stripped of irony, think The Player without the humour. Rather than conform to the very industry it is condemning, the film is almost played backwards, with the full credits appearing at the beginning rather than the end, and filmed, almost Dogme style, with natural lighting and mostly hand-held shots.
The film begins with the death of the eponymous protagonist, Ivan Beckman, a movie-industry super-agent (brilliantly played by Danny Huston, looking very much like a young Jack Nicholson), and proceeds to unravel the events leading up to his tragedy. We are thrown deep into the world of Hollywood players, and a more despicable, cynical, reckless, prejudiced, and selfishly hedonistic bunch of people you are unlikely to meet. Here is a microcosm of much that is wrong with humanity; greed, self-destruction, ego, and disloyalty, fuelled by copious amounts of cocaine, ecstasy, and meaningless casual sex. Upon hearing of Beckman�s death, the rest of his colleagues merely laugh it off as an inevitability, a drug trip gone too far, despite being told of his lung tumour. Beckman himself we find is indeed a dislikeable character yet we watch riveted as he slowly loses control over his own destiny upon discovering he has cancer.
From this point on, the film becomes a touching and tragic tale of the fragility of human existence as Ivan battles with his illness, trying to piece together some kind of meaning to his own life, caught between sense and addiction ("Last night I felt an intense pain. I took every pill in the house but it wouldn�t go away. I tried to find one image to cling to that would help me through it�but all I could find was shit"). In his struggle we glimpse a reason for the drug taking and alcoholism in that it provides a way of hiding from oneself and from others. In the face of death however, the need for belonging and security is heightened and Ivan is no exception.
This could so easily have ended up as a miserably unflinching piece of cinema yet its execution is superbly engaging and moving. The use of dramatic classical music throughout provides a stark beauty amongst the ugliness, as indeed do the loving shots of glinting sunsets and panoramic views over LA. Brave, tough and yet tender. Awful title. |
