A great write-up of the Ice Harvest.
Unholy Humbug: The Ice Harvesthttp://www.mcnblogs.com/pride/

Fargo took a few heaps of critical support to get crowds in the door to appreciate its mix of loopy good-heartedness and noirish convolution. The Ice Harvest, an exquisitely sleazy twenty-first century proto-noir, hasn't been as lucky with its bracing brew of the deadpan, implacable, inexorable, and downright cruel. Most reviewers don't get it. Some hate it. And audiences, based on weekend returns, don't seem to cotton to movies with "Ice" in the title. But Harold Ramis' The Ice Harvest (from a script by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, based on Scott Phillips' 2000 novel), is a marvel, tautly paced, immaculately crafted. It's also as misanthropic as Bad Santa, as effortlessly bleak as It's A Wonderful Life, and as cynical of the human condition as the output of novelist of Jim Thompson (The Grifters, Pop. 1280). Which, in some ways, makes it a remarkable effort in a world where the word "cinema" has long since been supplanted by "marketplace." (It's so brutally precise that it almost makes me want to go back and watch Stuart Saves his Family, a Ramis film esteemed by Manohla Dargis in her lukewarm New York Times notice.)

It's Christmas Eve in Wichita. Charlie Arglist (John Cusack, ably playing a puffy, middle-aged loser) is a mob lawyer with a warm spot in his cold heart for strip-club majordomo Renata (Connie Nielsen, playing an ambiguously European femme fatale, part Barbara Stanwyck, part Jessica Rabbit). Business associate Vic (Billy Bob Thornton, all glint and threatening smiles), convinces Charlie that robbing his boss (Randy Quaid) of over $2 million and skipping town on the holidays is a swell idea. Let the triple-crosses double over and the mayhem begin. Oliver Platt, playing the husband of Cusack's ex-wife, rolls his own substantial charm into the most sustained nightlong drunk in recent movies, a Falstaff-meets-Toby Belch modern man who's also nursing an uncommonly unhealthy death wish. (Charlie is an even more frightening drunk, downing shot after drink after shot with little visible effect.) Alar Kivilo's (A Simple Plan) lighting is gritty without murk (as opposed to the smeary look Stephen Goldblatt used to light Rent), with the movie's succession of bars harking back to the parched squalor of John Huston's Fat City, and framing often as punchy as Weegee's crime photos. (And as the noose draws tighter, classical photographic elements are more pronounced, such as bars of light slashing across a scheming female's eyes.)

Of the script co-written by Benton, one of the writers of Bonnie and Clyde, Ramis jibes that it's an "existential noir new-wave thriller," but he's not really joking. The script came to him from producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger (Election, Cold Mountain), after Benton decided he didn't want to make a relatively low budget film late in his career. "They're like two college professors, they're like no other producers I've ever met," Ramis, whose wrists swell with prayer beads, says. Of the script: "It was so well-written, I wouldn't have to write anything. By nature, I'm a lazy and reluctant writer. The word 'mature' kept popping into my head. Ninety percent of the screenplays come from two generations younger than mine. It's not yet mediated by life, but by the movies they've seen and liked."

Ramis' sets are known for their collegiality. "I consider it my real goal in life, to be happy." Of direction, he says he has little ego. "The real job is to gather all the good ideas from everybody." It's a job he's still learning. "Oddly enough, at 60 years old, ten films, directing for twenty-five years, I still feel like a beginner."

The Second City/SCTV alumnus envies actors. "Actors perform a remarkable kind of ritual service for all of us. It's a very brave kind of groping they do, and they do it on camera in front of everybody. I told [Second City's original director] Bernie Sahlins that I couldn't invest my self-esteem in how others seem me. And Bernie said, 'You can quit acting but that won't change anything.'"

Ramis' conversation is compulsively professorial, apothegms formed as jokes. "My ex-wife called me 'The Rabbi,' which maybe is why she's my ex-wife." Before getting the script, he says he'd been doing extensive reading, "processing it all, the Torah, Buddhism, CNN." Focus Features' co-president topped Ramis at one point, sending a memo regarding a (rejected) bleak ending drawn from the novel. "It was like a tutorial," Ramis says, quoting the bow-tied screenwriter-executive, "'The audience doesn't need you to tell them they're going to die."

PRIDE: Isn't suspense timing a lot like comedy timing? Something about economy?

RAMIS: That's probably true. But you know, I'm wiling… I'd go out on a limb and say that timing is timing for anything. I've always thought that editing a film is like, is like music. And I'm a singer, I actually play and sing. You're always trying to figure out how to hold that note, how long is long enough and how long is too long. So, uh, yes, the timing in suspense seems to be like comedy, because you want to produce a real result, you're building toward some release. In suspense, it's what's going to be behind that door. How do you time the reveal of something? It's a lot like timing the punchline of something. There's a wonderful moment in the film, Mike Starr, the actor, is inside that trunk, his character, Roy Gelles, he tells John's character, "When I get out of here, you know I'm going to kill you, don't you?" And then Billy Bob says, "You're one fucking optimist if you think you're going to get out of that trunk alive." And Mike says, "Let me out! Listen, I'm your only hope!" "I thought you just told me you were going to kill me, Roy." And there's a long pause. The camera's just on the trunk. And he goes, "I didn't mean it." The question of how long to hold that pause [had] nothing to do with how the actors played it. It didn't matter. In the editing room, you get to control those pauses. And our editor cut it sort of the way you would cut it normally; he's not a comedy guy, Lee Percy. But I said no, no, no, hold that for a while. Let's actually feel Mike Starr thinking about it. For me, it was a great object lesson in comedy timing.

PRIDE: How dark is too dark for your tastes, as opposed to what an audience might expect?

RAMIS: This is not a script I wrote. I chose to do this because I loved the script so much. And when you have a script that calls for someone plunging a hunting knife into someone one's foot, well, you've got to deal with that. It's obviously not going to be a laugh riot at that moment. The question becomes how painful, how graphic, how much blood, what's John's response to it? How do I do the fight that's swirling around them without making it cheesy or fake? I didn't want it to look like stunt men fighting. Those moments had to be played, all the violence was real and [it was] indicated as real. And yet we knew, we expected, people to be laughing at certain things in the film. So ehhhh… Everything's discovered. You make all the plans you can. You get it on film, [you hope], from many different angles. [Ramis chuckles.] And many different kinds of distances. And then you start looking at it. And I always say you don't know where the top is until you go over it. People are always wondering, how do you avoid going over the top? Well, you don't. You push it and push it and push it and push it and [hope] you have actors who will go there with you. And then you, "Oh no, that's actually too much, I'm not buying that, let's pull it back a little." In the editing room is where you find out what film you've made.

PRIDE: The script is strong stuff; I'm thinking of how the death of someone close to a major character is dealt with.

RAMIS: Pretty dark moment. As vile a line as you'll ever hear. That's the wisdom and talent of Richard Russo and Robert Benton. I don't think that moment was in the novel exactly that way or with that dialogue. But y'know, Billy Bob just delivered it well and it's so nicely written. And there's not a single punchline in the movie. The actors don't deliver comedy lines. They just say what the characters say and there's no winking at the audience. Everyone means what they say and it's deadly serious.

PRIDE: Oliver's consistently big.

RAMIS: Oliver, yeah, he is big. I think I first said to him, y'know, my fear… Drunk characters were a staple of the 1940s. Someone talked about [how] we haven't seen a character this drunk for that long in a film [since then]. How different is… We saw Cheech and Chong, it was different substance abuse, but they played stoned all the time. So we have this souse, and I think for me, he's written like a Shakespearian buffoon almost, y'know, he's not just a comic relief. He's in touch with a deep, deep sadness and frustration that has all of these kind of philosophical ripples. He talks about society-"There's nothing left for men in this society." Oliver was deeply engaged on that level. I knew there was a wonderful intellectual process going on for Oliver when he started to play it. I got scared, going over the top. I went back to an old acting cliche: when you play drunk sometimes… Real drunks try to act sober, y'know. And he went, "I know, I know." But Pete's all over the place. And like real drunks, and I've been with some really great drunks. I don't drink myself, but… They go in and out. For a while, they're more lucid and then get a little more tired or have another drink, they're back where they were before. So he's all over the place. It seemed appropriate somehow. He was doing it so well and it seemed so endearing. In a movie that's just so bleak, y'know, as an audience I think we want to feel something good for somebody. I think he's a terrible man in a lot of way, he's weak, his flaws overwhelm his assets, but you still like him. And that's part of the wonderful thing about Oliver as an actor and also John as an actor.

PRIDE: It gives his character leave to deliver hilarious but scathing lines like about the Christian bartender's boyfriend being on the Campus Crusade for Cunnilingus… only a drunk or a child gets that.

RAMIS: I learned courage from actors.

PRIDE: So what are the big ideas in this one?

RAMIS: I'm always wrestling the whole idea of meaning in life. As I get older it's become a more important question. When you're young, you know what life is about. It' s about making a career, about finding the right woman… or women. It's about money and power. It's pretty clear. That's the map when you're young. And then you get it or you don't. You get those things or you don't. And then you have to… Even if you get them and you find out no one of them or the combination of them is the answer. Right? There isn't enough money, sex, y'know, good food, champagne, whatever it is, to make you happy. Buy you a little time, maybe, but as you get older, the big questions just keep coming back. And then I started reading more and more in the history of religion and theology and philosophy and psychology. I got real interesting in existential psychology as a result of doing Analyze This, ironically. So my whole worldview started to change. And then along comes this movie. It shows what life can be like if you live without values, without discovering personal meaning in life. And I don't think meaning is something that can be given to you or that is derived externally from religion or someone else's rules. Conventional moralities, y'know. It's something that every person has to discover for themselves all of the time.

PRIDE: There's an emerging tradition of bitter holiday movies. Is this an odd Christmas movie?

RAMIS: Well, Christmas is odd, isn't it? It's a festival of family dysfunction. It just points out the ironies of everything-people return to the families of origin that damaged them in the first place and everyone pretends it's okay. Or they don't, which is even worse like the Christmas dinner in our film A lot of people are just sick at Christmas. And the ironic contact of, the overindulgence of children, the excessive gift giving to drive the capitalist consumer machine in a world where billions of people can't find water to drink or anything to eat. It's kind of amazing.

PRIDE: What's your advice to aspiring screenwriters or filmmakers?

RAMIS: I'd say "Dump her, she's no good for you."

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I loved it and wondered how many would think it's merely the Cusack imput that drug me in. That might be but still...I loved it.
So many great lines. Still it's not for the mary poppins lovers out there. I'd advise ya to see it.
As for me, it's one of my favs. of all time.

later
sass