Ice Harbor Proves a Winner
THE ICE HARVEST
"In this country, all that's left for a man is money and pussy." So says Pete (Oliver Platt), drunk best buddy to Charlie Arglist (John Cusack), the hangdog hero of The Ice Harvest, a grubby little crime picture set on Christmas Eve in Wichita Falls, Kansas. As directed by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) and cowritten by Richard Russo and Robert Benton (Nobody's Fool), the movie doesn't quite hang together. It feels ragged and disorganized, like a rough draft that was never satisfactorily revised. But it boasts so many original and confounding touches and such a distinctively adult quality of melancholy, that it makes a stronger impression than more slickly perfect films particularly Shane Black's superficially similar sprightly-but-glib Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which, like Ice Harvest, draws on film noir and farce.
Granted, there's nothing electrifying or even clever about the plot, which finds Charlie, a mob lawyer, teaming up with a local pornographer (Billy Bob Thornton) to steal $2 million from a strip-club impresario and gangster (Randy Quaid). The theft itself gets barely any screen time, and the rest of the film is really just a series of sad and nasty comic setpieces that show Charlie sinking deeper into trouble-lying and drinking, enduring savage beatings, driving aimlessly around the sleet-encrusted city and talking trash about his ex-wife with Pete, who married the woman and became a stepfather to Charlie's neglected, resentful children.
Although the movie runs just 88 minutes, it feels poky. And with all the alcohol guzzled onscreen, I'm tempted to call the film boozy. And costar Connie Nielsen's central performance as Renata, a flirty strip-club owner, is such a dud that it lowers the whole film by a couple of notches. She's like a Femme Fatale 9000 robot. When she asks the hero to risk his life and money in exchange for the chance to sleep with her, her smirky, purring delivery screams, "Ulterior Motive!" Ramis admits Renata's obviousness by flagging her with the official visual marker of film noir damehood, the raccoon-mask eyelight.
Still, it's hard to recall a recent Christmas-themed Hollywood film that pulls such a surprising, defiantly non-mainstream bait and switch. The Ice Harvest starts out promising to blend a couple of familiar, already uncommercial modes (film noir and farce), then gets progressively more personal and idiosyncratic and even more uncommercial. It's less interested in playing genre games than characterizing the baseline middle-American man's dream-a wife, a steady job, a couple of kids, a house in the 'burbs-as a bland prison that can only be escaped, fleetingly, on Friday and Saturday night. The droll weasel Charlie slipped free of his matrimonial hoosegow and is currently trying to escape the confines of mob lawyer life via a stupid act of thievery. Pete survives amid the ruins of Charlie's former home life by pickling himself in booze. Thornton's Vic Cavanaugh is also looking to make a domestic jailbreak. When he talks about his bored, overweight, materialist wife, you can practically hear the bad thoughts rattling around in his head. Thornton's curdled resentment is the movie's nihilistic fuel. He's American cinema's hardboiled loser prince: Bogart reincarnated as a schmuck.
Ramis careens through the script's landscape of suburban malaise like a mean drunk driving a snowplow. He delivers on the unfulfilled promise of the sitcom-cute Analyze This and Analyze That by making a bracingly frank, sometimes outright cruel movie, a broken-backed comedy about dead-end scuzzbag husbands and daddies that insists on describing the American dream as a siren song, a soft-bellied heartland careerist's equivalent of a femme fatale's come-hither stare. The movie is packed with images of status symbols as pseudo-holy relics. "Little Drummer Boy" plays on the soundtrack while a garage door rises like a curtain, revealing a luxury car and feminine beauty as sucker's bait, and the men frequent strip clubs called the Tease-O-Rama and the Sweet Cage, where one of them is fronted by a Venus de Milo statue wearing pasties made from Christmas tree lights. "I can't do my life, man," Pete moans. "I can't do it."
Except for Groundhog Day, a rare Hollywood comedy that grows sweeter and deeper with every viewing, Ramis' movies often sound more interesting than they play; they have craft and a concept, but no real vision. For all its undeniable flaws, Ice Harvest is an exception. Parts of the film have a drunk's blundering, affable honesty, a despairing but bemused quality that says, "I know I shouldn't be telling you any of this, but what the hell, we're best friends now. What was your name again?"
WALK THE LINE
Directed by James Mangold
The Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line has been damned with faint praise just like last year's Ray, to which it's been inevitably compared. It's true that Walk breaks no new structural ground; by this point, the musical biopic has become such a factory-tooled, Oscar-season template that if film broke during the middle of a screening the audience could probably act out the rest of the script, beat for beat. There's the moment where the boozing, cheating artist hero (Joaquin Phoenix) lists all the material things he's given his wife and then asks, "What else do you want?" and she cries, "I want you!" There's the scene where the hero's buddies convince him to try drugs for the first time, and the moment where the hero's plunge to rock bottom is signaled by an onstage collapse.
But director-cowriter James Mangold hits these beats so unselfconsciously, and his actors play them so simply and honestly, that after a few moments the "been there" feeling vanishes and you settle right into Cash's wavelength, a sad-stoic worldview that-in his twenties and thirties, the period covered here-seems predicated on the notion that life is just a series of things that just sort of happens to a person, that there's not much free will to speak of. Cash tells his platonic girlfriend, musical partner and future wife, June Carter Cash (a career-capping performance by Reese Witherspoon), that he plays slow not for aesthetic effect, but because he can't play any faster; he's always evading responsibility for his choices, and in a too-Rosebud touch, the script traces Cash's brooding passivity back to the death of his beloved brother when they were kids. When will filmmakers learn that in Citizen Kane, Rosebud didn't actually explain anything?
Walk the Line doesn't just tell you that artists are different from other people. It illustrates exactly how they're different by showing how Cash taught himself to write, sing and play guitar, and then later, to actually be Johnny Cash; it shows you the resentment relatives feel toward obsessive artist-dreamers who put roofs over their heads but also cheat, do drugs and don't come home; it shows you the gypsy camaraderie of Cash, Carter and their equally talented country and rockabilly colleagues as they wander 1950s America, making the devil's music and loving it. The scenes with Cash, Carter and the young Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and other future stars are the movie's comic and artistic high point. The sight of so many brilliant and randy young future stars jammed together on tour is just plain funny; they're like the Teen Titans of pop.
There's no cinematic sorcery on display here. Mangold, a perpetually up-and-coming studio director who never quite surpassed the freshness of his indie debut, Heavy, seems to be a purely representational filmmaker. But there's something to be said for representational filmmaking when it results in scenes as crisp and intelligent as these.