The Ice Harvest (2005)

*** / *****

Dark Christmas Eve drama with black comedy (very much on the melancholic side) added to teeter this right above complete dreariness, directed by the late Harold Ramis clocks in at 88 minutes and features Cusack as a mob lawyer who steals from his “boss” (Randy Quaid, who shows up in a single scene at the very end), associated with fellow cohort Billy Bob Thornton, both having planned and carried out the deed. Connie Nielsen was in EVERYTHING in the early 2000s, in this film as a sultry strip club operator tied to Quaid (he keeps her close to the vest and won’t allow her to leave), lusted after by Cusack…and later proven to be tied to Thornton, also. Ned Bellamy makes the most of his time as a bartender of one of Quaid’s strip clubs, promising to break the fingers of a stripper’s abusive boyfriend if he comes into the joint to start trouble…there’s a small melodrama regarding a stripper and a guy from her high school getting engaged once Ned accosts the aforementioned thug beau outside the club. Bellamy later gets some much-needed siphoned gas from Cusack when he plans to leave Wichita Falls.

The most meat of the film comprises Cusack and Thornton needing to get out of Wichita Falls as soon as possible while Quaid has a hitman (Mike Starr) out looking for the two betrayers. Later Cusack finds Thorton quite alive, believing him dead when he came to his home, looking to see if he was okay (at the beginning of the film Thornton keeps the duffle bag for “safe keeping”). But Starr is stuck in a chest thanks to Thornton who got the better of him, but not before Starr killed Thornton’s wife! How Starr won’t just shut up despite being in a very compromising position (with another gun he had hidden on his person, losing his main gun to Thornton), trying to convince Cusack that Thornton will kill him once they discard Starr in the frozen drink, even firing shots from the chest (almost hitting Thornton) is hilarious. Thornton using a golf club in a raging outburst due to Starr’s unflappable nature, banging away on the chest, is really beautifully absurd. Cusack is like, “Just shoot the guy.” Thornton, after having used a vice that severed Starr’s thumb to verify information as to what Quaid knows, wants him to experience drowning awake and alert...karma will not be kind to Thornton, either! The irony of what Thornton faces ahead once the involved parties make it to a practically frozen lake and a deteriorating ramp leading offshore over it is really classic.

The leggy Nielsen really lays on the seductive charm in this film. You see why men are crazy for her, although money seems to be driving everything, of course. A cool two million taken from the crooked Quaid is the object of great avarice. That many are dead by the end of this film is no surprise. When you follow figures in the mob and criminality, where theft of “blood money” is involved, a body count is surely expected. Women with strait-razors at the neck while sliding open their robes, kingpins (even in Wichita Falls) with silver pistols glistening from backroom stripper club light, and greedy lawyers skimming from their no-good bosses are all the rage in films like these.

Bellamy tells Cusack at the end that he’s the nicest guy he has probably ever met…sort of telling you that he ought to perhaps relocate to better company. Cusack’s lust for Nielsen and a bag in her closet, not to mention, a conversation by Thornton on the phone, later leaving with a woman he has been involved with (Cusack met him at a nice restaurant, seemingly interrupting a meal with that special someone) features the usual mob money plot developments where allegiances are fragile and trust is questionable, with double-crosses and further betrayal is commonplace.

Some carefully directed bullets from Starr’s gun despite his cramped confines throw a kink in Thornton’s plans but Cusack might just benefit from their fateful dual of shared gunfire. Thornton trying to stay afloat while a wound bleeds out, as Cusack offers him “company”, the frozen lake not the ideal resting place on Christmas Eve, and the inevitable showdown with Quaid not longer after—this film really does reiterate just how Nielsen is the real mastermind while all the men in her life are but pawns she wishes to move about until that money is hers. Cusack, the film’s protagonist, really is fixated on her and clearly wants her to be in his life. But Nielsen is about having that money and ditching Wichita Falls for good. Cusack is but a game piece meant to be discarded once the money is hers.

In a subplot, Cusack meets up with a friend, a lawyer played by Oliver Platt, married to his ex-wife. Platt is miserable with Cusack’s ex, sloshed already when the film introduces him for the first time. And a running gag is Platt’s insistence on telling anyone around him that  Cusack is a mob lawyer. Cusack, of course, hopes to discourage him. Doesn’t work. Platt seems ready to end this marriage, realizing why Cusack didn’t make it with his wife when they were married. Platt admits to Cusack that he was fucking his ex when Cusack and she were still married. And yet Cusack still remains Platt’s loyal buddy. And Platt is not a good drunk. He’s foul around Cusack’s children (while Cusack’s son hates him, his daughter adores him), and you can see the deterioration of the marriage, how it has reached a point of no return. Cusack, also, shows all the signs of a reawakened misery just being around his former family, the in-laws there with disapproving faces and the wife who holds her expression of Ice Queen, not saying much at all, while the men in her life seem devoted to what the liquor can take away that she hadn’t already. Misery loves company, I guess, because Cusack and Platt seem to be friends due to the experience of being married to her. There is this whole back story we just get a glimpse at…the dissolution of two marriages and the children tragically pulled into.

What I think makes Cusack just perfect for the lead is that you can see he realizes just how shitty he is. As a father, a former husband, and lawyer…Cusack has been a failure. I can’t remember too many moments where his face isn’t hanging or his countenance isn’t droopy. He’s so involved with the worst of the worst that it has rubbed off. I guess, because the money he stole is from such a loathsome character, the end where he does at least leave the kids some good gifts and seemingly his leaving Wichita Falls behind might result in a new lease on life, Cusack might pick up the pieces and try to wipe his slate clean. Platt joining him…when the film parts ways with us, the viewer, and them, it does leave us wondering just how that will work out. Platt might need a clean slate as well…can’t imagine he has anything to return to Wichita Falls to besides a wife preparing to bilk him for alimony and Cusack’s kids who want nothing to do with him.

This isn’t a cheery Christmas film. Wichita Falls is shot by Ramis as dreary, grey, depressing, and seemingly a place where joy goes to die. It is the small town where lost souls, some better off than others, might have some green to afford a house out of Architectural Digest with all the Christmas tree and green/red light iconography you’d expect of that time of year or drift in and out of Quaid’s many stripper joints, often forced to dance nude for little to no money on “slow nights”. It seems that in order to be happy in this film, leaving Wichita Falls is the answer.