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Richard Russo and Robert Benton's script boasts an entire cast of characters
that are uniformly irredeemable. The few who aren't are defeated and
pitiable - but these are mostly children. Our narrator, small-time
lawyer and part-time strip club owner Charlie Arglist (John Cusack), is
somewhere in between. Like one of his strippers, Charlie is bruised,
morally bankrupt, and desperate, deciding life owes him more than he's getting as an attorney for
Kansas' little-known
mafia, and so he and fellow strip joint owner Vic (Billy Bob Thorton) skim a
cool $2,147,000 from Charlie's boss (Randy Quaid). The film
follows Charlie's drunken night after the heist - a Christmas Eve with a
body count. At a time when The Polar Express is being theatrically
re-released and traversing the box office, The Ice Harvest is the
feel-good holiday treat for the rest of us.
Director Harold Ramis turns Wichita into a grease pit of countless strip
clubs and sterile suburban houses that better resemble dentist offices
than the homes of America's heartland. Ramis' Wichita is all brown snow and
bathroom stalls, creating a dark playground for his depraved characters.
With snappy dialogue and hearty sexual tension, The Ice Harvest is
masterfully moody. The cast plays up the tone with pitch-perfect hammy
acting, with Thornton and Connie Nielsen (as the distant femme fatale
Renata) leading the pack. What distract from the cynical fun are the
predictable tricks of the plot and the stale, all-too-familiar characters.
Cusack puts a noble effort into fleshing out Charlie, but he varies
too often between portraying a sniveling ball of timidity and a collected
alcoholic with a superiority complex. But this is one of those films that
you have to sit back and enjoy the mood without letting the lack of realism
bother you - kind of like The Miracle on 34th Street, but with a few
more shotguns. Zachary Jones
November 30, 2005
