luke warm
The Ice Harvest fancies itself as an existential film noir, its icy cinemascape neatly mirroring its icy heart • the perfect antidote to It’s a Wonderful Life. But despite some heavy-weight writing support and a splendid cast, director Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters) has done little more than piss in the Christmas egg-nog. His star Billy Bob Thornton did this sort of dark take on Christmas to greater effect in the fabulous Bad Santa.
It is Christmas Eve in desolate Wichita, and Ramis’ effort at jaundiced holiday cheer opens with crooked mob lawyer Charlie (John Cusack) shivering in the snow and musing about the perfect crime. It transpires that he’s only gone and relieved esteemed local mafia man (his boss) of a cool two million. The catch? He and his partner in crime, Vic (Thornton), can’t get the hell out of dodge because the roads have turned into ice rinks.
Instead of laying low, Charlie mopes around strip joints, flirts with Sweet Cage Owner Renata (Connie Nielsen in a cardboard cut out role) and flashes his wad in such a fashion that pretty much everyone figures he must be about to skip town. When he’s not peeling his ex-wife’s new beau off various bars he’s wondering whether his sleazy partner might be about to double cross him. And guess what? He is.
Ramis obviously maintains that all is required to fashion honest to goodness noir is a decent props department. Thus Cusack is never without his hip-flask, and bourbon is drunk as though it is going out of style. Before she has even had a chance to incompetently imitate Bacall’s graveled voice, the femme fatale is revealed to us by the hackneyed shade of her lipstick and the curl of her hair. Even Thornton lights his cigarette with noirish intent.
Noir has never been so much by numbers nor taken itself more seriously. Ramis’ snow-swept exploration of turn of the new century crisis of masculinity is overpowered by the shadow of that which preceded it. Cusack killed to perfection in Grosse Pointe Blank and David Lynch gave noir the ultimate shot in the arm with Lost Highway. Ramis may clutch at credibility by focusing on bleak swathes of snow shot through a blue filter, but Fargo did existential crises in extreme weather better.
The Ice Harvest is nothing more than an ice sculpture; whatever whimsy it fleetingly captures is doomed to melt.
2nd Feb 2006