The Ice Harvest (dir. Harold Ramis, 2005)
Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) is—in the words and intonation of Jesse Pinkman—a criminal lawyer. He works for Wichita, Kansas mobster Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid). This employment in no ways translate into loyalty, as Arglist and fellow criminal associate Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) have stolen two million dollars in cash from Guerrard in possibly the easiest Christmas Eve heist ever committed to film. Getting out of Wichita, however, is the problem. It is in the midst of an ice, making an easy exit all but impossible. In addition, Arglist is dealing with his former partner Pete Van Heusen (Oliver Platt), who has married his ex-wife, Guerrard’s hired gun Roy Gelles (Mike Starr), possible—nay, probable—duplicity from Vic, and a strip club proprietor and practically anachronistic femme fatale named Renata Crest (Connie Nielsen).
As The Ice Harvest is a neo-noir starring John Cusack, comparisons to the 1990 film The Grifters are all but inevitable. This is a little unfair, but only because most crime movies compare poorly to The Grifters. How can you expect to compete with a Jim Thompson plot adapted to film by Donald E. Westlake? You just can’t.
The response to The Ice Harvest at the time of its release was poor. Why isn’t it funnier? Harold Ramis directed it, so it should be at least as funny as Analyze That, if not Analyze This. The logic of this is completely inane. The Ice Harvest is actually a fairly robust crime story that happens to have some darkly comedic elements. Yes, Platt’s character is an over-the-top depiction of a man going through a midlife crisis, but you also see some grisly violence happen repeatedly. Dismissing the film as ‘not funny enough’ is to willfully misinterpret what you’re watching. The tone is closer to something like Charley Varrick from 1973. That Don Siegel film made Walter Matthau into a hardboiled antihero. The worst that you can say about The Ice Harvest is it does the same for Cusack, but not as well.
oliveresque 