The Ice Harvest (2005)

December 19, 2006

Written by: Richard Russo and Robert Benton
Directed by: Harold Ramis
Starring: John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Platt, Mike Starr, Randy Quaid

I’m not sure how I’d define the genre of “dark comedy” other than with the reassurance that I know it when I see it. The Ice Harvest is a dark comedy. I know because I laughed at things that involved (often gruesome) violence and comedic moments involving conversations with a hit-man who’s stuffed in a trunk on his way to being dumped in a lake, discussion as to whether the trunk will fit in a good old American car or a Mercedes, and random shots fired into and out of said trunk.

Charlie (John Cusack) is the biggest and best mob lawyer in Kansas. We know this because his drunken best friend, Pete (Oliver Platt), tells anyone who wants to hear it. And a few who do not. Pete is married to Charlie’s ex-wife and just before interrupting his own family Christmas dinner he reveals to Charlie that he was sleeping with her long before they broke it off. “Whaddaya think?” Pete asks? “It makes me think: I wonder who she’s sleeping with now” is Charlie’s tired reply… and the fun has just begun. What most everyone doesn’t know is that Charlie has come up with a way to steal over 2 million dollars from his mobster boss and biggest client.

Charlie has the brains to figure out the score, but it’s his partner Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) who has the guts to actually pull it off. Then the boss discovers the theft sooner than they thought and sends one of his henchmen after them… and somewhere in the middle of all of this is Renata (Connie Nielsen), the hard-edged manager of one of the boss’s strip clubs and incidental femme fatale who appears to be falling for Charlie, and an amazingly clear photograph of a politician in a rather compromising position.

Of course things are not what they seem. Betrayal abounds, love and lust are confused with one another, the bodies pile up, and all in all it’s one long day in Wichita Falls where, as the constantly reappearing graffiti says, “as Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls.”

There were a lot of laughs in this movie, most courtesy of the amazingly suitable roles for the main actors. Thornton’s role as the witty ne’er do well suits him well, Cusack’s Charlie seems like nothing so much as a more world-weary reprise of his character in Grosse Point Blank, and I’m pretty sure Oliver Platt has actually played this exact role in at least one other film and perhaps a TV show or two.

The Ice Harvest isn’t a film most will watch more than once, but it’s well worth the rental fee. And maybe that’s what this kind of confection is best for– a night at home with some popcorn and guilty laughs while waiting for the next weighty project from any of the fine actors killing time therein.

Tags: cinema, film, review, Screening Log