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Its Christmas! Time To Enjoy the Xmas Murders, Mayhem and Comedy of the Ice Harvest

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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I saw The Ice Harvest the other night on cable. I first saw it in the theater in November of 2005. I was visiting an East Coast city and encountering cold, rain and snow and ducking into the theater to escape same, found myself seeing a movie that was SET in cold, rain, and snow. It was oddly warming to see a cold winter movie during a cold winter day -- "I lived the movie."

The script was by Robert Benton and Richard Russo, who, 11 years earlier, had penned the very similar "Nobody's Fool," with an aged Paul Newman anchoring yet ANOTHER story set in cold, rain and snow. But that one wasn't a crime thriller with murders. "The Ice Harvest" is. Yet both "The Ice Harvest" and "Nobody's Fool" share a MOOD: melancholy, laugh-to-keep-from crying, depressed(all that cold and snow.)

"The Ice Harvest" cannily sets a few scenes inside nice, plush upscale restaurants at Xmas time, and you can FEEL the warmth. Ah, an escape from the elements. But "The Ice Harvest" also sets scenes in two seedy strip clubs and one VERY seedy massage parlor...thus cluing us in to the "criminal underbelly" of any small city.

Scripter Robert Benton was no stranger to "small city crime." He had written and directed the excellent "Nadine" of 1987, and I see The Ice Harvest as its cold weather twin. "Nadine" had been about Rip Torn running lethal criminal enterprises in sunny small town Texas. "The Ice Harvest" is about Randy Quaid running lethal criminal enterprises in snowy, Wichita , Kansas.

The premise, quickly: small town mob lawyer John Cusack and crooked ambiguously-employed (porn dealer? Strip club manager?) Billy Bob Thornton have contrived together to skim 2 million off of Quaid's enterprises(I figure the sex places are legal except for prostitution; Quaid's criminality extends to his willingess to kill traitors.) The cash is in a big satchel. Our criminal pair had hoped to escape Wichita immediately after pulling the cash from the bank where they kept it -- but a major ice storm is making them stay in Wichita until morning. Will they survive the long winter's night before being found out by either the cops or the big hit man sent to kill them?

That's the mystery plot. But there's a major detour for Cusack(Billy Bob drops out of the movie for a long stretch) to hang out with a very funny, fairly wealthy drunk lawyer played by Oliver Platt. It turns out that Platt has married Cusack's ex-wife, and is raising Cusack's kids, and is a big, overweight mess of a man who eventually confesses to Cusack, "I can't do my life, man."

There is this drunk confessional by Platt to Cusack:

Platt: I gotta tell ya..in your last year you were married to Marybeth...I was (BLANKING) her. All the time. Like minks. At your office. In your bed. Aren't you mad?
Cusack: No, more like curious.
Platt: About what?
Cusack: Well, who is she BLANKING now while you are married to her?

A fair point. Cusack even has to attend a family Xmas dinner with his ex-wife(gorgeous, trophy wife, ice cold) and ex-kids and their new dad Platt.

"The Ice Harvest" posits Cusack as a crook, but a kindly, decent crook who maintains a deadpan quietude in the face of the perpetually pissed-off Billy Bob(in his third such hilarious performance after Bad Santa and The Bad News Bears), the drunken mess Platt, and the Lauren Bacall sound-a-like femme fatale played by Connie Nielsen(now Wonder Woman's mom.)

The question for Cusack is: who can he trust? Partner in crime Billy Bob? "Loving" femme fatale Nielsen? Drunken buddy Platt? And...can he survive such murderous foes as Randy Quaid and his massive hit man, Mike Starr?

But this is an atmosphere tale. Its definitely a Christmas movie, with Christmas music on the soundtrack and Christmas decorations everywhere, and the kind of "forced frivolity" that adults must put on during the holiday season.

I also like how the strip clubs do no business on Christmas. One stripper balks at dancing on Xmas Eve, but her boss says: "You know you gotta dance on the bad days as well as the good days." Strip club manager Connie Nielsen laments: "How come suddenly on Christmas nobody is willing to look at T and A?" Point well taken.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

To go with all the great gloomy Xmas ice storm atmosphere, The Ice Harvest delivers big laughs, first courtesy of Oliver Platt's drunk lawyer(who says loudly to everyone of Cusack's lawyer: "See this guy? He's a MOB lawyer. M...O...B. Mob. Don't mess with him") and then courtesy of Billy Bob, who re-enters the movie to give us one great line, and one great scene.

The great line:

Cusack finds Billy Bob's wife dead, shot through the head in front of the Xmas tree in Billy Bob's home. Billy Bob appears and explains:

Billy Bob: (The hit man) actually tried to force me to tell him where I hid the money by threatening to shoot my wife. Evidently, he assumed a mutual love, trust and commitment between myself and my wife(laughing) that simply wasn't there."

The great scene:

Its extended and moves from place(Billy Bob's suburban garage) to place(the open road in a Mercedes) to place(a fragile small pier extended over a small freezing lake) as our two criminals try to dispose of the afore mentioned hit man...while he is locked in trunk, making death threats, and firing occasional bullets out of the trunk...with Billy Bob(early on) beating on the trunk with a golf club in fury(notes Cusack quietly: "You'll pop the lock if you keep doing that.")

This adds up to a "body disposal" in the Hitchcock tradition except that the body is still alive and thus the emphasis on insult humor and slapstick is great(and what if the hit man DOES get out of that trunk?)

I recall, back in 2005, liking everything about The Ice Harvest: the setting(so THAT's what Witchita looks like, I thought -- until I learned that they really filmed in Chicago), the atmosphere, the Xmas feeling, the pairing of Cusack and Billy Bob(of whom Quaid says "one's a brain without a d--k; the other's a d---k without a brain -- ie. Cusack's the smart one and Billy Bob's the tough one.) Oliver Platt's hilarious-then-sad drunk act. And Connie Nielsen doing a REAL femme fatale.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Also, the very rarely shown concept -- I think Charley Varrick is the peak, with Nadine a worthy follow up -- of how organized crime flourishes sometimes in the most banal fronts. Or in the case of The Ice Harvest, in the most obviously seedy fronts: strip clubs and massage parlors. "The Ice Harvest" makes the point of juxtaposing the more upper class dining and residential enclaves of Wichita with the underbelly sex clubs that the men of the town use for escape.

There's a phrase written on a Men's Room wall that comes to haunt The Ice Harvest: "As Wichita Falls, So Falls Witchita Falls." It rather sums up the pithy, eccentric tone of the film. And hey, maybe I like it because "Wichita Lineman" is one of my favorite songs.

As a character through line, though, there is the estimable John Cusack, who has made a career(perhaps now near-over)
as a second-tier guy, starting young (teenage comedies) and maturing into roles of love and crime(the great Grosse Pointe Blank of 1997, where he's a hitman at his high school reunion.)

The ultimate theme of The Ice Harvest is how Cusack's quiet, cool-but-nerdy and nice criminal, ultimately has what it takes not only to outwit his foes(ala Charley Varrick) but to kill them. Will he be the last man standing? Well, two endings were shot. Only one made it into the movie.