Common Cold
A few weeks ago, Harold Ramis was sitting in a hotel conference room discussing the subtext of The Ice Harvest, his new film based on the novel by Scott Phillips and adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo. Ramis explained that he took the project because it was about far more than two men swindling a mobster out of $2 million on Christmas Eve. Rather, he insisted, it dealt with the fact that no one can be trusted anymore. “As a nation,” Ramis said, “we’re living in a dark time.” So it’s, like, all political and existential and shit — or so says the guy who co-wrote Animal House, Stripes and Caddyshack.
Ramis has made far worse movies: Club Paradise, Analyze That, Stuart Saves His Family, the Bedazzled remake. For the dark lark The Ice Harvest, a movie full of degenerates and schmucks and pornographers and hoodlums who seem to make up the majority of the populace of Wichita, Kansas, he need not apologize.
John Cusack’s Charlie Arglist is a big-time lawyer in a small-time town looking to make a break for it on the slipperiest night of the year. (After many years of playing the hopeful romantic, Cusack may be better suited to the role of hapless dope.) Charlie drives a nice car and wears a decent suit, but he’s big time in the middle of nowhere — “Kans-ass,” as his drunken pal Pete (Oliver Platt) puts it. He’s a failure disguised as a success: Charlie warms bar stools in strip clubs, couldn’t keep his marriage together (his wife ran off with Pete), can’t get his two little kids to acknowledge him, and can’t land Renata (Connie Nielsen), the pretty owner of a rinky-dink strip bar.
Charlie’s partner is a double-dealing pornographer named Vic (Billy Bob Thornton). You never really understand how these two ended up as friends and partners in crime — the movie begins with Charlie making the illicit withdrawal as casually as he might take $20 from an ATM — but they do deserve each other.
A better title might have been It’s a Miserable Life. If Groundhog Day was Ramis’ Capra homage, this is his Capra parody, a movie about a man doing the worst things imaginable at Christmastime to make his life just a little bit better come New Year’s Day. Charlie, unlike Bill Murray’s Phil, isn’t going to come out of this experience a better man or a changed man.
Whatever Ramis’ intentions for The Ice Harvest — political parable, comic anti-Christmas caper, something slightly more respectable than a work for hire — his movie is fun, if too familiar. We’ve been here before, even if he hasn’t. This is lightweight stuff dying to be seen as heavy, and it just isn’t. People betray each other in movies all the time, and Ramis can drill for subtext all he wants, but here he comes up not with rich crude but just some tap water.
