director
Harold Ramis
screenwriters
Richard
Russo
Robert Benton
based on
the novel by
Scott Phillips
producers
Albert Berger
Ron Yerxa
cinematographer
Alar Kivilo
music
David Kitay
editor
Lee Percy
cast
John Cusack (Charlie Arglist)
Billy Bob Thornton (Vic)
Connie Nielsen (Renata)
Randy Quaid (Bill Guerrard)
Oliver Platt (Pete Van Heuten)
Ned Bellamy (Sidney)
Mike Starr (Roy Gelles)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 88m
u.s.
release: 11/23/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other harold
ramis films
reviewed on this website:
- analyze
this
- analyze
that
- bedazzled
- multiplicity
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Already headed for box-office
oblivion after a tenth-place opening during the busy Thanksgiving
weekend, The Ice Harvest is the best movie nobody's seeing
right now. With any justice it'll rally on DVD and find a new
life as a moody film noir cult film -- which is what it
is, despite the slapstick-heavy ads. The movie finds John Cusack
back in morally tenuous territory after too long in romantic-comedy
hell; true, Cusack was once the prince of romcom, with Say
Anything as his crown, but he has aged (can he really be
pushing forty now?) and gained complexity, and he should
never again have to stare longingly into a leading lady's eyes
unless he's just shot her or been shot by her. He's meant for
darker, more astringent stuff now -- The Grifters pointed
the way, Grosse
Pointe Blank sealed the deal -- so The Ice Harvest
is excellent news.
Cusack is Charlie Arglist,
resigned to his lucrative if soul-deadening gig as a mob lawyer.
A mob lawyer in Wichita, Kansas, yet. Are there even any
mobsters in Wichita? Apparently so, and they're as slovenly as
you'd expect -- even lower-level wannabes like Spider in GoodFellas
would sneer at these mooks. Charlie has lifted some serious cash
from one of Kansas' illustrious crime bosses -- Bill Guerrard,
played by Randy Quaid with a welcome sense of menace after too
many, well, Randy Quaid roles. Charlie's partner Vic (Billy Bob
Thornton in yet another finely tuned dyspeptic-scummy performance),
who sells porno, had the idea for the theft but not the means
to carry it out; he needed Charlie, trusted by the mob and presumably
allowed access to strip-club backroom vaults where $2 million
might be stashed.
The Ice Harvest puts itself to bed within a short,
sharp 88 minutes, yet it takes its time, pausing to soak in the
depressed atmosphere weighed down, as in The
Ice Storm, by freezing rain. (The two movies would
make fun companions, as both concern repressed passions -- for
cash, for sex -- that heat up when the weather outside is frightful.)
Director Harold Ramis has previously shown a knack for dialogue
and for working with comic actors, but until now I pegged him
as a styleless director. Working with cinematographer Alar Kivilo
(who shot the equally frosty A
Simple Plan), Ramis discovers the gun-metal-blue despair
of a town on its uppers (the movie was actually shot in Illinois).
Men like Charlie, or like his soused buddy Pete (Oliver Platt,
going over the top of caricature into real pathos), stare at
themselves in dingy mirrors in bars and wonder how they got where
they are. Will money fix it? No, but it might ease the pain.
You may have gathered that
the movie is not a laugh-fest. It's being sold as such, but what
you take with you are the unstressed crime-does-not-pay moments
that emerge from action rather than speeches -- a bad man sinking
in freezing water under the weight of his wife; a character shuffling
uncomfortably on a foot he's just pulled a knife out of; the
general malaise of strip clubs with bruised strippers and femmes
fatales like Renata (Connie Nielsen), who owns one such club
and keeps herself going -- or perhaps amused -- by hoarding embarrassing
photos of hypocritical local politicians performing non-Christian
acts with the paid talent. The Ice Harvest, though,
has an eye-opening pedigree (novelist Richard Russo and Oscar-winning
writer/director Robert Benton -- who adapted Russo's Nobody's
Fool -- are the screenwriters), and the movie is more about
the failed humans in this web than about the clever weave of
the web itself.
Cusack, effortlessly projecting
decency even in this squalid environment, gives Charlie enough
self-aware wit to recognize how far and how cheaply he's sold
himself out. He grounds The Ice Harvest in identifiable
reality; Charlie is too smart not to see the sewer he's swimming
in, but too depressed to respond to the crime around him with
anything but more crime. The movie, thank God, is not one of
those twist-ending-for-its-own-sake thrillers, or one of those
Tarantino clones pitting quirkily violent men against each other
without having Tarantino's sense of irony. It has its own cold
heartbeat. If that appeals to you, I suggest you do your bit
to support The Ice Harvest in theaters, because when a
lot of you tell me you want intelligent movies made by adults
for adults, you're asking for movies like this one.
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