It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
With Thanksgiving just around the corner, the holiday season is upon us, which in addition to caroling and other merriment, brings a wave of new movies into theaters.
One of the first films to arrive and help usher in the holiday spirit is “The Ice Harvest,” a dark comedy/drama which tells the story of two men on the run from the mob who face more than their fair share of complications on the way. Directed by Harold Ramis, the movie concerns two friends, Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) and Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) who work for mob boss Bill Gerard (Randy Quaid) in Wichita, Kansas of all places.
Charlie is an attorney who is given a full-time job keeping Bill and his associates out of prison, while Vic runs a pornography outlet for Bill. Tired of living and working for a criminal, they steal more than two million dollars from their boss.
On Christmas Eve, Vic and Charlie decide to take the money and run. Predictably, things don’t go entirely according to plan. Vic manages to remain calm and cool, but Charlie begins to succumb to the pressure of stealing money and running from an organized criminal. His search for added reserve takes him to a gentleman’s club for a few drinks, where he runs into a stripper, Renata (Connie Nielsen), who he has a thing for. In his somewhat impaired state, he ends up saying too much, and it doesn’t take long for word to reach Bill that his former employees are trying to skip town.
Perturbed over the recent turn of events, Bill sends an enforcer after Charlie, who finds himself slowed down after he runs into his friend Pete (Oliver Platt), and is forced to take care of him, despite the fact that Pete may be even more of a drunk belligerent than Charlie.
With “The Ice Harvest,” Ramis has created a dark holiday-themed comedy in the vein of “Bad Santa.” There are plenty of laughs along the way, most of them in a sort of nervous, I-can’t-believe-I’m-laughing-at-this sort of way. It’s not so much that the chicanery that occurs is overly raunchy or anything along those lines, but the fact that it is a holiday movie that focuses on a corrupt lawyer and a pornographer stealing money from their mob boss doesn’t really jive with the Tiny Tim notion of Christmas most movies project.
The movie itself is pretty bleak, and Ramis uses a lot of weather shots, showing the cloudy grey sky, or the snow and ice covered streets and fields which not only lend to the wintry feel but also to the hopeless, dangerous tone of the character’s plights. Ramis also does a commendable job balancing the racier elements of the plot (read: murder, organized crime, women of ill repute, etc.) with comic relief that’s actually funny, not to mention there are enough twists and turns to keep the audience interested without being hard to follow.
As with any comedy, the most important part i order to achieve success are the performances of the actors, and that is where “The Ice Harvest” falters slightly. Cusack reprises his role of the brainy, obsessive and neurotic professional that he seems to play in all of his films. His method seems to work as Charlie, as Cusack is appropriately skittish, with his eyes darting constantly while stammering and mumbling his lines. While he definitely fits the bill as the squirrely Charlie, something about it just seems flat and phoned in.
The same could be said of Thorton as well. Although his logical, calm portrayal of Vic offers a nice juxtaposition to Charlie that yields some genuinely funny moments, it seems that this partnership isn’t utilized enough – Thorton doesn’t receive nearly as much screen time. But probably the best performance of “The Ice Harvest” belongs to Oliver Platt. He is simply hilarious as the inebriated Peter, playing the happy drunk to a T, alternately animated and near catatonic. Whether he’s crashing a Christmas Eve dinner – spitting vulgarities and bits of turkey alike – or sitting quietly, staring emptily into space, he is easily the funniest character in the film.
“The Ice Harvest” paints quite a different portrait of the holiday season, replacing carolers with attorneys with a penchant for stripclubs, and jolly St. Nick with a rather porcine Randy Quaid. While some of it tends to be hit-or-miss, it is generally entertaining and quite different from the spate of feel-good movies that are sure to arrive shortly. Anyone looking for a decent crime caper with some good laughs should give this one a shot.
Bah humbug indeed.
