Ray Pride

Harold Ramis' "The Ice Harvest," an exquisitely sleazy twenty-first century proto-noir, is deadpan, implacable, inexorable and downright cruel, a marvel of moviemaking, tautly paced, immaculately crafted. It's also as misanthropic as "Bad Santa," as effortlessly bleak as "It's A Wonderful Life," and as cynical of the human condition as the output of novelist Jim Thompson. Which, in some ways, makes it a remarkable effort in a world where the word "cinema" has long since been supplanted by "marketplace."

It's Christmas Eve in Wichita. Charlie Arglist (John Cusack, ably playing a puffy, middle-aged loser) is a mob lawyer with a warm spot in his cold heart for strip-club majordomo Renata (Connie Nielsen, playing an ambiguously European femme fatale--part Barbara Stanwyck, part Jessica Rabbit). Business associate Vic (Billy Bob Thornton, all glint and threatening smiles) convinces Charlie that robbing his boss (Randy Quaid) of more than $2 million and skipping town on the holidays is a swell idea. Let the triple-crosses double over and the mayhem begin. Oliver Platt, playing the husband of Cusack's ex-wife, rolls his own substantial charm into the most sustained nightlong drunk in recent movies, a Falstaff-meets-Toby Belch modern man who's also nursing an uncommonly unhealthy death wish. (Charlie is an even more frightening drunk, downing shot after drink after shot with little visible effect.) Alar Kivilo's ("A Simple Plan") lighting is gritty without murk, with the movie's succession of barrooms harking back to the parched squalor of John Huston's "Fat City," and framing often as punchy as Weegee's crime photos. (As the noose draws tighter, classical photographic elements are more pronounced, such as bars of light slashing across a scheming female's eyes.)

Of the script written by Richard Russo and Robert Benton (co-writer of "Bonnie and Clyde"), Ramis says, "It was so well-written, I wouldn't have to write anything. By nature, I'm a lazy and reluctant writer. The word `mature' kept popping into my head. Ninety percent of the screenplays come from two generations younger than mine. It's not yet mediated by life, but by the movies they've seen and liked."

The dexterity of "The Ice Harvest"'s filmmaking suggests that suspense timing is a lot like comedy timing. "That's probably true. But I'd go out on a limb and say that timing is timing for anything. You're always trying to figure out how to hold that note, how long is long enough and how long is too long. The timing in suspense seems to be like comedy, because you want to produce a real result, you're building toward some release. In suspense, it's what's going to be behind that door. How do you time the reveal of something? It's a lot like timing [a] punchline."

Many of the opening weekend's reviews have been either uncomprehending or offended by its heart of coal. "This is not a script I wrote. I chose to do this because I loved the script so much," Ramis says. "And when you have a script that calls for someone plunging a hunting knife into someone's foot, well, you've got to deal with that. It's obviously not going to be a laugh riot at that moment. The question becomes how painful, how graphic, how much blood, what's John's response to it? How do I do the fight that's swirling around them without making it cheesy or fake?"

Ramis' conversation is compulsively professorial, apothegms formed as jokes. "My ex-wife called me `The Rabbi,' which maybe is why she's my ex-wife." Before getting the script, he says he'd been doing extensive reading, "processing it all, the Torah, Buddhism, CNN." With a Harold Ramis picture, Big Questions loom like the Grim Reaper's laughter. "I'm always wrestling the whole idea of meaning in life. As I get older, it's become a more important question. When you're young, you know what life is about. It's about making a career, about finding the right woman... or women. It's about money and power. It's pretty clear. Then you get those things or you don't. Even if you get them, you find out no one of them or the combination of them is the answer. Right? There isn't enough money, sex, good food, champagne, whatever it is, to make you happy. Buy you a little time, maybe. But as you get older, the big questions just keep coming back. I started reading more and more in the history of religion and theology and philosophy and psychology. I got real interested in existential psychology as a result of doing `Analyze This,' ironically. My worldview started to change. And then along comes this movie. It shows what life can be like if you live without values, without discovering personal meaning in life. And I don't think meaning is something that can be given to you or that is derived externally from religion or someone else's rules. Conventional moralities, y'know. It's something that every person has to discover for themselves all of the time."

"The Ice Harvest" is now playing.

(2005-11-29)

Also by Ray Pride

Born to Rent
Chris Columbus says "Rent" is the movie he was born to make
(2005-11-21)

Tip of the Week
Wichita's a town some hundreds of miles south of Fargo, but Harold Ramis' latest, "Ice Harvest," is kissing-close to the Coen Bros.' "Fargo," and that's a good thing
(2005-11-21)

The one you're looking for
When a movie moves me as much as "Walk the Line" has, I figure there's got to be something wrong with me: I don't believe my eyes and ears
(2005-11-15)

Tip of the Week
Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's "Ballets Russes" is one of those inspired, awe-inspiring documentaries that are feats of eavesdropping
(2005-11-15)

Splash Panel
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Catching a Buzz
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Tip of the Week
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Through the past, darkly
(2005-11-01)

Author Visit
(2005-11-01)

The Art of War
(2005-11-01)

Tip of the Week
(2005-11-01)

About Spritz
(2005-10-25)

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