Review: The Ice Harvest

In frozen, shabby Wichita, Kansas, Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) is a lawyer for a local mob personage. It’s not a great job: Miserable hours, depressing working environments and minimal benefits. Charlie has a plan to change all of that – namely, steal over two million dollars on Christmas Eve and get out of town – a plan that’s going to require the help of Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton), a steely middle-manager in the same crime organization Charlie pushes paper for. As The Ice Harvest opens, Charlie and Vic have stolen the money; that was easy. What’s going to be hard is getting away with it – but all they have to do is stay quiet, act casual and kill a few hours before they head out for somewhere warm and far away as their Christmas present to themselves. It’s not going to be that easy…

… And it’s not going to be that exciting, either. Directed by Harold Ramis, The Ice Harvest is a film where the big names in the credits (not just Ramis, Thorton and Cusack but also screenwriters Robert Benton and Richard Russo) somehow wind up making for a very little movie. Charlie wants to get out of town, but while he’s waiting, he figures he might as well do a few things – have a drink with his old friend Pete (Oliver Platt) and make one last fitful try at seducing strip-club manager Renata (Connie Nielsen), whose world-weary but retro charms have always made an impression on him. As Charlie tries to act normal at Renata’s bar, the Sweet Cage, she knows something’s up, but can’t put her finger on it: “It’s against my religion to give people advice, but you should either sober up or get real drunk. …” It’s against my religion to give film makers advice, but everyone involved in The Ice Harvest would have done well to follow a similar all-or-nothing philosophy.

The one possible path that might have changed the film was if the moviemakers had chosen to, essentially, make the hell out of The Ice Harvest – made Cusack more bleak than meek, given Thornton more to do than just look great in a nice suit and better wig, dived into the whisky-and-cynicism feel of the genre instead of just dipping a tentative toe into it. The other option would have been to walk away from Russo and Benton’s ambling, shambling script; watching The Ice Harvest, I was left scratching my head wondering what, exactly, about this film was crying out for it to be made in the first place.

There are nice moments in The Ice Harvest – after years of Bruckheimer films with glossy strip-club sequences, it’s nice to see the cold-cut, goose-flesh reality. And you get Oliver Platt as Cusack’s lifelong friend despite – or perhaps because – Platt’s now being married to Cusack’s ex-wife. Platt is a master of playing substance-abusing likable jerks, and when he comes on screen, it’s like the movie has a new special effect – the Drunk-a-Tron 2000 – that, like any special effect, has to be used sparingly, for fear the magic might either run out or overshadow the rest of the film.  But Russo (best known for novels like Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls) and Benton (who adapted Russo’s Nobody’s Fool for the screen, and also won Oscars for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer) don’t have much else; The Ice Harvest has plenty of armed standoffs but no tension, nothing but plot complications and nothing to hold our interest.

Most maddeningly, neither Cusack nor Thornton is given the chance to show us anything new here. Cusack’s been playing sad-sacks so long that the fabric of it is starting to get a little thin; as for Thornton, he’s been playing taciturn hard-asses for quite some while as well. I actually had an idle thought while watching The Ice Harvest – well, actually, I had many, but this one was actually about the film – that maybe reversing the casting and letting the leads play against type would have been a nice change of pace. Have Cusack be the man with the guts and Thornton be the man with the plan – that might have been, at the least, different.

But The Ice Harvest isn’t interested in being different; it’s interested in taking moments from better films like Fargo and Blood Simple, in recycling film noir costumes and hairstyles for Nielsen without giving her anything to do or say, in relying on our memories of previous films from Cusack and Thornton instead of creating something new. Director Harold Ramis has made brilliant comedy in the past – Groundhog Day, most notably – but in The Ice Harvest, as in his lucrative-but-dull "Analyze” films with De Niro and Crystal, he seems uncomfortable with crime comedies, incapable of mixing murder and mirth. That blend is normally a tough thing to pull off as well as it’s been done in, for example, Get Shorty or, to cite the obvious inspiration for The Ice Harvest’s venal and stupid crooks, Fargo. The Ice Harvest lacks the grim, grimy intensity of a great crime comedy – it’s got plenty of cold, but very little snap.