Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love

Ice capades

The Ice Harvest a fun, if formulaic, underworld caper film

A cold, steely rain is pelting Wichita, Kansas on Christmas Eve when The Ice Harvest opens, and it’s put a crimp in lawyer Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) and his associate Vic Cavenaugh’s (Billy Bob Thornton) plans. They’ve just embezzled over $2 million from their mob boss Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), but because of the weather, they won’t be able to leave the ice-bound city until morning. So the plan is for Vic to hold the stash while they split up for the evening and go about their lives like normal.

Deeply involved in Wichita’s seedy underworld, acting normal for Charlie means hitting the bleak stripclub circuit, featuring names like Tease-O-Rama and the Sweet Cage, and getting progressively drunk. Trouble is, he’s being a bit more generous than usual, and he’s having a hard time staving off his paranoia, especially when he has to start avoiding his boss’s henchman, Roy Gelles (Mike Starr), who seems to be right on his tail. While Vic is as cool as can be, Charlie’s behaviour starts to attract some attention.

First, there’s the Renata (Connie Neilson), the femme fatale who runs the Sweet Cage. She’s the type of woman that turns men into fools, and she senses Charlie’s newfound wealth almost as soon as he opens his mouth. And then there’s Pete Van Heuten (Oliver Platt), Charlie’s drinking buddy, who is so drunk he keeps announcing to the world that Charlie is a mob lawyer. Drunk or not, though, he’s no slouch, and noticing that Charlie is being different, begs his friend to take him wherever he’s going. And there’s also the pesky reappearing police officer who keeps finding Charlie doing things like drinking and driving or carrying the drunken Pete home. If Charlie makes it through the night without spilling the beans or getting arrested, ripped off or killed, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle.

Based on the novel by Scott Phillips and directed by Harold Ramis (Analyze This and That), The Ice Harvest has all the makings of a wonderfully seedy film with cynical humour. Cinematographer Alar Kivilo (A Simple Plan) captures the film noir aesthetic, and he works well with the rainy weather, giving a nice gray hue to the whole film. But well shot or not, the film never really takes off.

Neither Thornton nor Cusack truly come off as the underworld denizens they are. While Thornton plays his usual endearing slimeball character, his role isn’t so large as to take command of the film. Cusack, meanwhile, is too much of a wallflower to be believable as a mob lawyer, but not bumbling enough to be funny. He also never makes us believe that his life is truly in danger—the menace he feels is never quite suspenseful or visceral enough, and the only credible danger to Charlie’s plans of sipping umbrella drinks on some sunny coast is Neilson’s Renata. With her slutty but classy attire, smoky voice and Jessica Rabbit hair, she has calculating, man-eating gold-digger written all over her, and you know that it’s only a matter of time before he tells her about the embezzlement in an effort to woo her. Platt, though, gives The Ice Harvest some deliciously funny moments, and he steals virtually every scene he’s in.

With the help of Platt, Neilson and Quaid’s late-film appearance, The Ice Harvest does tell a good story, complete with enough twists and enough good characters to keep you entertained, but it has the potential to do much more than that, and it’s a potential that, sadly, never quite gets realized. V

The Ice Harvest
Directed by Harold Ramis • Written by Robert Benton and Richard Russo • Starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Connie Neilson • Opens Fri, Nov 18

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