| Written by John Shea,
on 31-10-2005 08:31
|
Published in : Reviews, Movies |
Editor Lee Percy introduced his movie at last week’s FilmColumbia Festival. He said that what he loved about Focus Features, the company that made the film, was that they liked to pair successful directors with what was for them unusual material. This movie pairs Harold Ramis with a script based on the novel by Scott Phillips. Essentially that means pairing someone known for making light hearted comedies with a dark comedy.
The dark comedy is often the toughest of genres to work with. More often than not, the resulting film is a failure, either too funny to be dark in tone or too grim for the comedy to fit comfortably in it. Ramis would appear to be a natural. He takes a story of vicious motives, unvarnished greed and revenge and filled with not a single character of virtue and finds the right tone that lets the whole thing roll forward as a highly entertaining comedy. This is not light praise. Such a combination is often deadly, even in the hands of an experienced director. Look at Barry Levinson’s Envy from earlier in the year. Even with a great cast that turkey lay on the screen, barely stirring a mild chuckle and far more likely to be the source of headaches.
The story starts with mob lawyer Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) stealing over $2 million from a high-ranking Kansas mob boss on Christmas Eve. This is no caper film though. The crime is done before the credits are and we never have a clue how he pulled it off. All we need to know is that he stole the money and his buddy Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) talked him into it. The two are going to split town in the morning, to settle somewhere warm and outside the clutches of the money’s original owner. All they have to do is play it cool for the night and then get on a plane in the morning. This is much easier in theory than practice it turns out.
A mob enforcer quickly turns up looking for Charlie at the strip club Charlie owns. Maybe it’s a coincidence but Charlie takes no chances, heading over to a rival club, where the hit man appears as well. Now fully paranoid, he tracks down Vic at a fancy restaurant, who urges him to remain calm and just act like himself. Vic then heads off and leaves Charlie, who is quickly saddled with a friend, Pete (Oliver Platt), who is so drunk the manager asks Charlie to see him home safely. If you have been given this task to do, you know that nothing that follows goes well. Escorting a seriously drunken friend back home is at best a difficult task, as the drunk will try to veer off on tangents at any given moment and will almost certainly vomit somewhere you’d rather they didn’t. Ramis mines this effort for everything it has; producing monstrous laughs that will almost guarantee you will miss chunks of dialog. Oliver Platt raises drunken behavior to an art form, particularly while brandishing a turkey leg or massively over stepping the bounds of good taste while trying to charm a pretty young woman. If the year is a bit weak for good supporting actor roles, pencil Platt in for an Oscar nomination. Comedic performances aren’t often properly recognized by the Academy but this one is good enough to deserve some attention.
I won’t get into any more detail on the plot because a lot of the movie’s entertainment is in watching things unravel. Money, particularly in large doses, tends to make people act oddly and this movie is one giant testament to that idea. Apart from Charlie’s young daughter, there doesn’t seem to be a kind or honest individual in the movie. The question isn’t are these people crooked, it’s how crooked are they? That’s often hard to judge as most characters, unsurprisingly, aren’t terribly willing to come right out and say how untrustworthy they are. That leaves Charlie, trying just to survive the night so he can enjoy his ill-gotten gains, in the awkward spot of figuring out whom he can really trust. Charlie himself is no saint, although his early displays of kindness and graciousness at his club give the audience the early mistaken impression that he’s a nice guy. We’re used to John Cusack playing nice guys, so we take the bait and go along assuming that he’s a good guy mixed up with crooks. It’s a sharp bit of casting because his history makes him a mild red herring but his ability to deliver dry responses to all manner of strange behavior helps carry the dark tone. Cusack rarely lets his character get too worked up, continually giving a deadpan response that can be quite funny but it keeps the tone from getting too silly. If you had the same character played by someone like “Chandler from Friends”, his over reactions would quickly throw things out of whack. Cusack’s dry calm responses are perfect for a mob lawyer used to dealing with the unpleasant. On a similar note, Billy Bob Thornton’s history of playing really obnoxious characters pays off as we expect him to be a problem and then really aren’t sure how to read him for awhile.
One thing that works particularly well for the movie is the sense of history to these characters. When they speak of a character we haven’t yet met in the movie, you get the sense that they all know this character. The characters we do know have long histories with each other, something that becomes apparent the longer we see them in action. It’s not the sort of thing a movie needs but it helps by tangling their lives together so that every action resonates through the web of connections and produces a variety of reactions beyond the one immediately obvious. For instance, the connections between characters ratchets up the laughs considerably because he isn’t being a drunken fool to strangers but to people they know and will have to deal with in the future. It speaks very highly of the screenplay (and presumably Phillips novel, unread by me) that it ties all this together so smoothly.
Of all the movies that appeared at the FilmColumbia Festival, The Ice Harvest is the one most likely to make a big impact at the box office. The ads and trailers so far are selling it as a bit of a slapstick comedy, but it is far better than just that. If it opens well, word of mouth should help propel it to a strong run. Personally I will make a point of adding it to the DVD collection when the time comes. Anything this intelligently funny is worth having around.
- John Shea
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