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December 5, 2005
OGIC: A Tale of Four Movies
The Ice Harvest may be the most misleadingly marketed film ever. It snuck up on me--the very first I heard of it was from Dave Kehr's fairly new blog in November (thanks to Cinetrix for first word of DaveKehr.com). He wrote:After all the failed attempts to capture the flavor of the great noir novelists like Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Charles Willeford, here is the film that finally does it, and without betraying the slightest sign of self-consciousness. This is no stuffed-and-mounted "homage" but a living, breathing film with a black heart and a sense of humor. Ramis demonstrates again how closely related comedy and suspense timing are, introducing his twists and reversals with the same dual sense of surprise and inevitability that sets up a great punch line. His control is perfect but his presence is imperceptible–one definition of high classical style.
Color me excited! But then the television ads started coming on, and they told a different story. How to reconcile Kehr's anointment of the film as neonoir par excellence with the advertising campaign's invocation of the hilariously crude Bad Santa? My confusion only grew when the movie's marketing campaign turned up at a Chicago Blackhawks hockey game I attended in the middle of November. Ice hockey, ice harvest--very high-concept, that! At the time, friend EH (formerly Our Friend on the Block, before she hightailed it to a different, sadly distant block) wondered aloud whether the bleak Ice Storm had been similarly touted at NHL rinks, and we laughed. But now, having seen the not at all merry Harvest, I can't say I think that would have been so much less fitting.
This is a deeply misanthropic, even cruel movie, as Tim Hulsey has discussed in terms that are stronger than I would use but not, I think, unfair. His review appears here, and he has more general thoughts springing from his reaction to the movie here. Reading Tim's review influenced my thinking about the movie, which I thought I liked at first. There were some factors that clouded my judgment. The Ice Harvest was cowritten by a favorite writer-director tandem of mine (and of Terry's), Robert Benton and Richard Russo, and is a little bit like what you might get from crossing Nobody's Fool with The Last Seduction. If that seems hard to imagine, there's good reason. Those films are inhabited by what are practically different species of human beings and proceed from wholly different notions of human motivation. In The Ice Harvest you have a town full of Wendy Kroys, driven by the basest desires, thinly disguised as the sorts of complex, simple-deep characters that live in a Richard Russo novel. They banter half-affably, half-abusively, like typical Russo oddballs, but their bites are far worse than their bark. John Cusack's antihero Charlie doesn't bite except in self-defense, but, for that, he is surprisingly empty. While viewing the movie I felt grateful that the character wasn't sweetened or sentimentalized, but in retrospect he's not any way redeemable or interesting, apart from being a guy lucky enough to be played by John Cusack.
In the end, I'm also not sure whether this movie would have seemed so painfully dark if it hadn't been for the willfully misleading marketing campaign. There's that, and there's a long sequence, before things get seriously ugly, that could almost have been borrowed from Nobody's Fool, with Cusack and Oliver Platt, playing a drunken ne'er-do-well, comically making their rounds on Christmas Eve like two sad clowns. Then all of a sudden it's Blood Simple, and you might feel a little blind-sided. Also, I'll never listen to that Alvin and the Chipmunks song quite the same way again.... (Such lumberingly ironic use of the chirpy cartoon rodents is emerging as a bit of a theme this year. The same song, I noticed, appears prominently in an ad for a TNT holiday movie about gangsters. Aw, leave the little guys alone! Sure, they're annoying, but they mind their own business eleven months a year!))
I've said it before, but this is as good an occasion as I'll get to say it again: rent Benton and Russo's previous project, Twilight. Besides its cast of geniuses, it exemplifies what The Ice Harvest seems to be trying, haplessly, to be.
And speaking of movies that you can't pin down, how about Pride and Prejudice? The trailer made me cower behind my popcorn. The reviews, most of them splendid, made me wrinkle my brow and reconsider. Now Ross Douthat comes along confirming precisely my initial suspicions and blasting the undiscriminating reviewers who made me doubt. Still on tap is Quiet Bubble, who read the novel in preparation. I'll be curious to hear QB's verdict. And yours--let me know what you thought of the movie, especially if you feel protective of the book. Should I see it? Skip it? Picket? I used to read the novel every Christmas vacation, and perhaps this year would be a good time to return to that personal tradition, in the spirit of silent protest.
Posted December 5, 2005 2:43 AM
