After his film of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was hacked to bits by unthinking, unscrupulous Hollywood producers, English director and creator of schlock masterpiece Candyman, Bernard Rose, was determined to keep control on his next artistic venture. So he decided to take the cheaper and more direct route by utilising digital technology for a freewheeling adaptation of Tolstoy’s The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, incorporating much by way of scathing Hollywood satire based on the director’s own painful experiences.
The result is Ivans xtc, a fantastic account of the life and death of Ivan, (Danny son-of-John Huston) a giant among Hollywood’s coke-addled, pond-slime sexual predators brought low by terminal cancer. The film achieves a remarkable contrast between Ivan’s life as an executive surrounded by gibbering sycophants and his unfeasibly lonely end in a hospital room pining for any kind of human contact. Of course, this being Tinseltown, there’s little or none to be found.
At the centre of this inventive film is Danny Huston’s performance which lends an incredible joie de vivre and aching humanity to a character that is inescapably vile in many respects. Indeed, Huston’s turn is probably the most commanding and seductive of the year.
Proof of digital cinema’s worth as a democratic medium, this beautifully nihilistic exercise is little short of a work of genius.