Nobody has more fun playing a burned-out sociopath than Billy Bob Thornton. It’s dead simple.Īnd the casting is pitch-perfect. This is just two guys taking money from a third guy and trying to get out of town, but getting held up because the roads are icy. The result is a movie for those who enjoy the mood of noir but not the genre’s ubiquitous and impenetrable scenes of exposition, where we have to juggle the names of a dozen characters and try to remember what evidence suggested what and who killed whom. He creates a closing-time-at-the-wrong-bar mood and sustains it with ease. Ramis is surprisingly at home with the material. They just live in a world where people get killed easily. When people die, and plenty of them do, it happens with an almost anticlimactic inevitability. It’s sketches of a handful of mysterious people who are out too late, living with the fallout of doing too many bad things, bumming around all the places no one goes on Christmas. It’s only 92-minutes long, but it takes all the time it wants with laconically paced scenes of alienation like that. They share a couple terse sentences and Cusack is back to the road, with no hope in sight. He’s a dead man walking, smoking and drinking in the bathroom, before leisurely taking a beer right out of the refrigerator and drinking it in plain sight of the clerk. In the film’s best scene, Cusack is at a gas station at night. We go with Cusack to lonely country roads, lonelier strip clubs, even lonelier upscale corporate bars, and finally, when everything goes to hell, the loneliest place in the world. Ramis banks the movie on Cusack’s weariness, framing the movie through his eyes, essentially taking us on a bleak and rainy car ride through the fringes of Wichita on Christmas Eve, on a tour of all the places we really don’t want to go. His weariness totally overwhelms his charisma. It’s the sense that this is somebody who knows all the angles and can use his wits to get out of danger, who can pretend he’s Bogart, but it’s knowledge he’d rather not have. He brings to The Ice Harvest what his spiritual predecessor Robert Mitchum brought to the criminally neglected Farewell, My Lovely. It’s the kind of role he should play more. That makes him a perfect noir everyman in the tradition of Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler. Mostly he just seems tired, like he had a very, very long and lonely night. Throughout the movie, no matter what neo-noir filth and sleaziness surrounds him, he never seems like part of his environment. It’s because the mob knows what he did, but you get the impression he’s always like that. He’s a mob lawyer, and he’s always sizing people up in silence, eternally suspicious. “People always say there’s no such thing as the perfect crime, but I don’t agree with that.” He almost whispers his narration, as he almost whispers all his lines, like he’s having a conspiratorial conversation at the kitchen table, trying not to wake up someone in the bedroom. It opens with Cusack on the side of the road, staring out toward a cold and empty Midwest horizon on Christmas morning. But integral to all these scenarios is mood, what it feels like when you're alone in the wrong place. You imagine the exact kind of scenarios that have made film noir potent, ever since Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck couldn't start their car in Double Indemnity. Being out late when nobody is out late gets you tangled in a web of atavistic fears and suspicions. What puts you anywhere near that grain silo at midnight on Christmas Eve? What puts you anywhere near those railroad tracks at that hour? There are almost no good reasons, but there’s an enormous canvas of bad reasons, all of them darkly alluring and mysterious. I started imagining stories for all the other cars and trucks that were also in the wrong place. I’m not supposed to be here, or anywhere near here. It wasn’t loneliness, it was just an overpowering sensation of being in the wrong damn place. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that something was deeply wrong. Every parked vehicle in every parking lot. The drive was normally deadening, but on Christmas Eve, every car or truck on the road was fascinating. I got my coffee, bought a DVD of The Ice Harvest, because it was five bucks and, what the hell, it’s Christmas, and rolled out. The clerk told me he was in a metal band, or at least he used to be, but he couldn’t find the time to practice anymore. Occasionally I would pass a grain silo with some Christmas lights strung up, or a strip club, but really the only stimuli were what I saw in my headlights.Īt about midnight I pulled up to a gas station for coffee. There were no city lights in the rear-view mirror and no city lights approaching anytime soon. It was pitch black, and I was in the middle of nowhere on a decommissioned highway in the outskirts of Tehama County, California. I was driving home on Christmas Eve in 2009.
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