Movie Review	Slip Sliding Away: The Ice Harvest by M. Faust

John Cusack in The Ice Harvest

What hath Bad Santa wrought? Does the unexpected success of 2003’s cult comedy mean that Hollywood will be compelled to trot out a yule-deflating movie every December? Last year brought Surviving Christmas and the atrocious Christmas with the Kranks. This year brings The Ice Harvest, a noir wannabe with patches of black comedy that are initially amusing but in the long run prevent the story from gaining traction.

John Cusack stars as Charlie Arglist, a Witchita, Kansas lawyer employed by local mobster Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid). With just enough of his soul left to realize how low he’s sunk, Charlie schemes to start a new life with $2 million embezzled from his employer. His partner in crime is Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton), a rather less tortured soul who manages Guerrard’s thriving empire of nudie bars.

The film opens on Christmas Eve, just after Charlie and Vic have got their hands on the cash. Their getaway plan is stymied by an ice storm that makes the roads impassable, forcing them to stay put until after midnight. “Just act normal for a few hours and we’re home free,” Vic advises his partner in crime.

Easier said than done. Charlie’s attempts to calm his nerves with booze launch him into a night of confrontations with players in his unhappy life, from his even drunker and unhappier best friend (Oliver Platt) who married his ex-wife, to the coolly gorgeous bar manager (Connie Nielsen) he has long admired and who tonight seems suddenly interested in him.

Charlie’s personal dramas coincide with the unraveling of his and Vic’s “perfect” scheme, as he and Vic have to deal with a mob enforcer, a councilman eager to escape a blackmail scheme, and inevitably Guerrard himself.

For about the first half, The Ice Harvest works well enough as a mordant comedy. Setting the story at Christmas brings out the worst in all of these people, both literally and cinematically. The interiors—strip joints, cocktail bars for office parties, the sterile family dinner organized by Charlie’s ex-wife—are as frigid and joyless as the streets soaked with freezing rain. Charlie is our hero not because we have any reason to root for him but because he’s less despicable than anyone else in town.

But by the time the film gets into the final stretch, you start to realize that it has no idea where it’s going. The Ice Harvest was written by Robert Benton and Richard Russo (adapting a novel by Scott Phillips), and it sounds like material for the kind of character-driven story they’ve done so well, both individually and in partnership in films like Nobody’s Fool and Twilight.

I suspect the fault lies in two places. John Cusack was probably not the best choice for Charlie. He’s so inherently likeable that we never really accept him as a soiled soul in need of redemption, merely as a nice guy who’s gone a little off track. Nor does the film really push him to work against his image.

For that, blame director Harold Ramis. A filmmaker who has ridden to success almost entirely on the coattails of his “Second City”/“Saturday Night Live” connections, he does this material no service by emphasizing its black humor. It’s not really a comedy, despite some attempts to nudge it into the territory of Bad Santa (which succeeded by taking a go-for-broke approach). Ramis does nothing to prepare us for the darker turns of the film’s second half, when we need a stronger sense of the characters to overcome some clichéd plotting. (The climactic revelations are even less surprising than those of Derailed.) Ramis admits in the film’s press notes to not being a reader of crime fiction: perhaps he’s unaware of how familiar much of this stuff is. At the very least, he doesn’t seem to realize that in this genre nihilism needs to be earned. He reduces what in other hands could have been a dark classic to the level of a throwaway parody.