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‘Ice Harvest’: A Christmas film so wrong, it's somehow right
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“The Ice Harvest” is both film noir and a Christmas movie, which makes for an exhilarating sort of paradox — seasonal cheer spiked with defeat, humiliation, rage, lust and self-loathing. Just the kick in the chestnuts the holiday needs, if you ask me.
In a role that hangs nicely on his sad, pendulous face, John Cusack (“Identity”) plays Charlie Arglist, corrupt mob attorney, deadbeat dad and all-around lout. With the help of local smut king Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton), Charlie skims more than $2 million off the top of his client's ill-gotten fortune and makes ready to skip town. All on Christmas Eve, no less.
Director Harold Ramis (“Analyze This”) finds stark poetry in the seedy haunts of Wichita, Kansas on a damp, not-quite-freezing night. Certain that a mob goon is looking for him, Charlie hops from bar to bar, strip club to strip club, losing his cool, falling under the spell of a sultry caberet owner (Connie Nielsen from “Mission to Mars”) whose eyes glow eerily in the dark, a la Lauren Bacall.
Oliver Platt (“Diggstown”) is riotously Platt-ish as a boozy bon vivant named Pete who married Charlie's “grasping, hypocritical” ex-wife and is celebrating Christmas by making a raging alcoholic mess of himself. As Charlie's sole friend, he calls it like it is.
Written by old pro Robert Benton (“Kramer vs. Kramer”) and frequent collaborator Richard Russo (“Twilight”), the script has a dated, bygone feel, like something that collected 30 years of dust on a shelf at William Morris before some enterprising mail room clerk bumped it upstairs. It's relentlessly cynical and non-commercial, and completely welcome. Our pleasure is not derived from the outcome (with its classic noir structure, the outcome is fait accompli) but from its vision of bored, venal men, trapped in the bush leagues of the American underworld. (To this end, Randy Quaid drops by for a scene-stealing cameo.) Comparisons to “Fargo” and “A Simple Plan” seem apt.
There's also a question of taste. Like another Thornton movie, “Bad Santa,” this one offers vulgarity and yuletide sentiment together on a so-wrong-it's-funny platter of comic inappropriateness. (Early on, we hear a man bitterly cuss out a woman on the phone. Later, we learn it's his mother.) Offensive? Maybe to the literal-minded. In its double-negative, mortals-beware kind of way, “The Ice Harvest” reminds us of what the holidays are all about.
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