The Ice Harvest
Directed by: Harold Ramis 
Starring: John Cusack, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Platt, Randy Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, Monica Bellucci, Jenny Wade

It is so refreshing to see a film that is neither deliberately dumb nor intoxicated by its own importance, a film which is simply good. The Ice Harvest, Harold Ramis’ neo-noir, is exactly that. Every once in a while there comes a film that refuses to underestimate its audience and takes the chance to seek humour in the murky waters of crime without resorting to satirical overkill. This is a comedy about bad men doing bad things who are stricken with bad luck, yet it manages to enchant with deadpan literacy and provides us with a character we can root for despite the fact that stealing and lying is his second nature.

The character in question is Charlie Arglist, a Kansas lawyer to the mob, who meets every lethal complication with admirable decorum. The fact that he is played by John Cusack has a lot to do with the fact that we can like him no matter what. I cannot think of another actor who can play a character juggling with a catalog of crimes and have us think that in essence he is a nice man. Being the best lawyer to the mob is an iffy credit to start with, but he does not stop there. Charlie and sleazy porn trader Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) embezzle $2.2 million of local mob boss Bill Guerrard’s (Randy Quaid) money and cheerfully believe they can get away with this. This, however, is a world with a sense of timing and humour, which means that things will get a lot more complicated than Charlie and Vic would have liked.

An ice storm means that they would have to spend a night where they’d rather they didn’t. Charlie gets to chaperone a very drunk and unsubtle friend of his (Oliver Platt) who had married Charlie’s ex-wife and by extension has inherited the set of in-laws. Aside from his judicial duties, Charlie, too, owns strip a club and is quite enamoured by its manager Renata (Connie Nielsen), and their prospective romance could be a minefield not exclusively related to matters of the heart. On top of that, the crime boss gets wind of Vic and Charlie’s scheme and soon enough his hit man Roy Gelles (Mike Starr) appears and starts looking for the transgressors.

The complications build up to an inevitable comic disaster, but director Ramis aims for and achieves a naturalistic laid-back pace, which help him balance violence and goofiness without the self-awareness that, say, Tarantino or the Coen Brothers would have brought to this material. Ramis, working from a wicked and hip script by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, constructs a film that never has him trying too hard; it is as if there was no pressure to muscle in jokes that everybody will definitely get. The actors, too, draw strength from this: all seem exhilarated by the opportunity to perform comedy by their own standard rather than that of a dumbed-down broad ticket- buying public. Cusack is a joy as ever as an essentially kind man who finds the time to dispense advice to his depressed friend amidst his piling lethal worries. Platt is in scene-stealing mode as the said friend, Thornton reprises his trade-mark sleazeball of many a film, and Nielsen is weary sexiness personified.

There is nothing revolutionary in this film, but it does hold its own of the crowded Christmas marquee. It stands aside from the feverish gloss of the upcoming Oscar season and is all the better for it. It is modest and smart – one wishes more Christmas-themed films were likes this.