The Ice Harvest

What most impressed me about The Ice Harvest was the unexpected humor that consistently broke up the ever-present tension and suspense of the story. This was an excellent movie, both exciting and funny, with memorable characters that made me laugh even as I worried about the eventual outcome.

Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) and his buddy Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) have just stolen $2 million from Charlie’s boss, mobster Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), through a carefully planned scheme that should ostensibly go unnoticed for several hours. Their seemingly perfect crime having been successfully executed, Vic and Charlie must sit tight for several hours and wait out the bad weather, nervously hoping that their crime will remain undiscovered long enough for them to make it out of Kansas. Vic offers to watch over the money and instructs the increasingly anxious Charlie to act normal for just a few hours. Rather than simply going home where he won’t have to worry about interacting with others, Charlie instead chooses to visit as many places as possible in the span of a few hours in order to maximize the probability that he will give himself away. But of course, it wouldn’t be much of a movie if the rest of the plot consisted of John Cusack sitting around the house for two hours, so instead Charlie has a series of encounters at various strip clubs and bars over the course of the night. He soon discovers that Guerrard’s top hit man, Roy Gelles (Mike Starr), is asking around all the local strip joints for Vic’s and Charlie’s whereabouts—indicating that Guerrard has caught on to the theft much sooner than expected. Before Charlie skips town, however, he hopes to gain the affections of Renata (Connie Nielsen), the manager for one of Vic’s many strip clubs, by retrieving a valuable photograph of a local councilman’s one-night stand with her. Furthermore, when he runs into his old friend, Pete (Oliver Platt), a belligerently drunk buddy who is married to Charlie’s ex-wife, he agrees to go to his former in-laws’ house for a bit of antagonistic Christmas Eve dinner. As the evening wears on, Charlie begins to wonder whether Vic is going to double-cross him and take all the money, which gives him yet one more worry to occupy his fretful mind.

Charlie’s outings with the perpetually inebriated Pete were by far the best scenes, as Pete shamelessly hits on an chaste Christian girl in front of her progressively annoyed boyfriend, purposefully makes an ass of himself at his in-laws’ Christmas dinner and brandishes a turkey leg at his wife, pukes in Charlie’s car, and gets himself kicked in the nuts after making one too many inappropriate remarks. I suppose if you don’t find the misguided antics of ridiculously drunk people all that entertaining, then you might find these scenes more annoying than anything else. The interplay between Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton was very entertaining as well, but given that dark humor seems to be Thornton’s specialty, it shouldn’t be all that surprising to anyone. I loved all of the scenes with Vic or Pete in them, and when mixed with the suspenseful plot and straightforward nature of Charlie, I was left feeling quite satisfied with this movie.

Personally, I loved The Ice Harvest, but I think the audience for this movie will be very specific. It’s a dark comedy with a lot of tension built into the story, so some viewers might find the film simply boring. Otherwise, for those who like drier humor and a steady-pace, this is definitely a move to see.