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Script, digital aspects resign 'Ivans xtc' to mediocre status
Lisa Enos, Danny Huston and Peter Weller in 'Ivans xtc'
Artistic License Film
He lets the opening credits, set against a beautifully hazy Los Angeles, unwind for nearly nine minutes to Richard Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde."
He begins with the reported death of Ivan Beckman, a talent agent who had just become "the prince of Hollywood" with his signing of drug-addled star Don West (Peter Weller).
Ivan's body is still warm when his agency launches damage control; he was, after all, deeply into recreational drugs such as Ecstasy.
To accommodate Don, who wants to pick his own director for a script called "Weeds," Ivan's agent-colleague agent Barry Oaks (Adam Krentzman) loses no time dumping the furious writer-agent attached to the screenplay, Danny McTeague (James Merendino).
Twenty-five minutes into the picture, after Danny creates a scene at the funeral, we head into the flashback that consumes the rest of the picture.
Here we meet the driven Ivan (Danny Huston, who is John's son and Anjelica's half-brother).
The movie's surprisingly strong first half bustles along on greased dynamics as power brokers coddle each other, garnish their obsequiousness with professional compromises and dine on drugs, available women and each other.
Ivan never even reads "Weeds," the stinko script he's packaging, a point not lost on his coke-addicted girlfriend Charlotte (Lisa Enos, who co-wrote "Ivans xtc").
From the moment Ivan learns he has a fatally cancerous tumor, which seems to overtake him in a couple of days, the film loses momentum. The shock, the final binge, the convulsions. We're been there too often in more finely tuned films.
It's not that the second half of the film doesn't fit the first. Brash Hollywood kings often die of causes exacerbated by drugs. But while seeming to be the more considered part of the screenplay, it also is the more conventional.
Rose, who wrote the early drafts, based his work partly on Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886), partly on the experience of having his 1997 version of "Anna Karenina" butchered and partly on the career twist of Jay Moloney, Rose's former agent. Maloney became the head of the all-powerful Creative Artists Agency, was fired a year later for cocaine addiction, vanished and hung himself in 1999.
Although parts of the picture look unusually good for a movie shot on high-definition digital video, "Ivans xtc" suffers from the video glitches it imposes on movies: shots that don't match, a muddiness in darker scenes and an unnaturalness that creeps into performances.
Also, the recurring use of Wagner provides aural pleasure, but it dwarfs Ivan, a marginally sympathetic character and not a legitimately tragic one.
| 'Ivans xtc' |
Director: Bernard Rose
Stars: Danny Huston, Peter Weller
MPAA Rating: Unrated, but R in nature for nudity, sex, drug abuse, language and disturbing images
Where: The Oaks in Oakmont
