The Ice Harvest (2005)

The Ice Harvest opens with John Cusack sitting in a strip club on Christmas Eve, watching a dancer, waiting for midnight. He has just stolen two million dollars from a Wichita mob boss. His partner in the theft, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is somewhere outside in the ice storm. Cusack's character, Charlie Arglist, has a lawyer's habit of planning and a coward's habit of stalling. Harold Ramis, directing his last major studio picture before his death in 2014, lets this discomfort run for ninety minutes.

This is not a Christmas movie the way Home Alone is a Christmas movie. The holiday is the clock, not the decoration.

What Kind of Christmas Movie Is The Ice Harvest?

The film is a neo-noir black comedy based on Scott Phillips' debut novel from 2000, adapted by Richard Russo and Robert Benton. That's a remarkable writing pedigree for a movie that opened 10th at the box office in November 2005, grossing $3.7 million its first weekend in 1,550 theaters. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls. Benton directed Kramer vs. Kramer and won two Oscars for it. Phillips' novel was nominated for the Edgar Award and the Anthony Award, and won the California Book Award silver medal for Best First Fiction. None of that translated into a hit.

What it translated into was a very specific kind of movie: the kind where nothing works out the way anyone planned, everyone is drinking too much because it's Christmas, and the hero survives mostly through exhausted luck rather than competence.

The novel is set in 1979. The film updates it to contemporary Wichita without losing the essential Midwest grimness. There is something appropriate about setting a crime picture in the American interior during Christmas, in a landscape that offers no glamour, no escape routes, and where a bad ice storm is enough to trap everyone in their worst decisions.

The Cast Doing Exactly What You'd Expect, Which Is Fine

Cusack plays Charlie Arglist, mob lawyer, as a man in a permanent state of quiet desperation. He's not stupid. He knows this heist was a bad idea. He did it anyway because the alternative was continuing to be what he already was. Cusack has built a career on this particular register of intelligence-combined-with-poor-judgment, and he deploys it well here.

Thornton's Vic Cavanaugh, the pornographer partner, is the movie's real engine. He plays Vic as someone who might genuinely be dangerous, or might just be relaxed in ways that read as dangerous. The film is deliberately ambiguous about which. Every scene Thornton is in has an undertow of threat that keeps you from settling.

Oliver Platt has the showier role: Charlie's drunk, blundering best friend who also happens to have married Charlie's ex-wife. Platt is given several long scenes of spectacular inebriation, and he commits to them with the kind of physical specificity that turns what could have been broad comedy into something almost sad. Randy Quaid, in a limited appearance as mob boss Bill Guerrard, reminds you how good he was before everything that happened later. Connie Nielsen plays Renata, the strip club owner, as the only person in the film who might actually have a plan.

Monica Bellucci was originally cast as Renata but had to withdraw due to pregnancy. Ramis was also hoping to cast Bill Murray in Quaid's role, but Murray was in the middle of a decade-long falling out with Ramis following disputes on the set of Groundhog Day. Murray passed. The film suffers slightly for both absences, though Nielsen holds the role together.

Harold Ramis Making Something Mean

Ramis spent most of his career making comedies that find the warmth inside chaos: Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day. The Ice Harvest is the exception. It's genuinely cold. The laughs, when they come, arrive sideways. There's a recurring joke about a decoy bag being too light that pays off in a way that is both funny and appalling simultaneously.

He cut his fee to 20 percent of his usual rate to make this film, which tells you how much he wanted it. Filming took place in Chicago's suburbs rather than Wichita, which tells you how productions work. He also reportedly refused to call off shooting during a particularly brutal weather day because he had never lost a shooting day in his career and wasn't about to start.

Rotten Tomatoes sits at 47% with a critics consensus that reads: "The Ice Harvest offers a couple of laughs, but considering the people involved, it should be a lot funnier." That consensus is not wrong exactly, but it misses what the film is actually doing. It is not trying to be very funny. It is trying to be funny the way Elmore Leonard is funny, which means the humor comes from watching people fail to outsmart each other in front of you.

The movie doesn't redeem its characters or let the season provide a moral reset. Christmas Eve comes and goes, the roads stay icy, and the people who survive do so for reasons that have nothing to do with deserving it.