Criminally Ignored: The Ice Harvest (2005)

When most critics and film nerds speak enthusiastically about the films Harold Ramis has written or directed, they usually wax nostalgic for comedies like Ghostbusters, Caddyshack, Stripes, Animal House, or Groundhog Day.  There’s good reason to celebrate those films, they are all legitimately funny and hold up today when many comedies from the late ‘70s through the early ‘90s feel dated and cheesy.  But it’s a sad fact that his career took a downturn in the late ‘90s with such dreck as Analyze This, Bedazzled, and the even more abominable sequel, Analyze That.  When his comeback film rolled around in the form of The Ice Harvest, Ramis had been all but written off as past his prime and the film bombed.  Even on DVD, which would seem the ideal place for such a cynical, bleakly funny movie to find an audience, it has failed to make much of an impression.

Charlie (John Cusack) and Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) are miserable bastards.  Charlie is a shady lawyer in Wichita, Kansas who works for Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), a mobster based out of Kansas City.  Divorced from his cold wife, hated by his son, and depressed by his empty existence, Charlie wastes away his days by drinking steadily at any one of the several strip clubs that operate as fronts for Bill.  Vic also works for Bill, managing one of the strip clubs, various massage parlors, and pornography shops.  He resents his wife who has slowly eaten herself into obesity, and has a deep anger at being stuck in Wichita.

As the film opens, it’s Christmas Eve and Charlie and Vic have quietly embezzled two million dollars of Bill’s money.  All they have to do is get through the night as though nothing has happened, drive to the airport in Kansas City, and fly away from all their miseries forever.  But Charlie quickly grows paranoid as Roy (Mike Starr), an enforcer for Bill, arrives in town and begins asking questions about where Charlie and Vic are located.  To make matters worse, they can’t leave town until the morning because of an ice storm that has made it dangerous to drive.

To say anymore about the plot would ruin much of the fun of watching the film.

Interestingly, going just off this plot setup, the viewer could be forgiven for thinking it could only go in two directions:

1. A hard-boiled film noir about trying to get away with the perfect crime when everything is stacked against you.
2. A whacky, slapstick comedy that finds Charlie and Vic trying to screw each other out of the money while avoiding Roy and the possibility of violent death at his hands.

Ramis, working from a script by veteran writer/director Robert Benton and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Russo, throws a curveball by revealing the film is actually a grim character study of Charlie.  Sure it has elements of film noir in the stylized lighting and a femme fatale in the person of Renata (Connie Nielsen), the owner of yet another strip club, whom Charlie has convinced himself he’s in love with.  And the film is also very funny in places with witty, caustic dialogue and vividly drawn and performed supporting characters.  But when all is said and done, Ramis is merely presenting us with the sad tale of a man who thought he could sink no further only to discover there was still a long way to go before hitting rock bottom.

In many ways, the film feels almost experimental.  After the first fifteen minutes that establishes who Charlie, Vic, and Renata are and that Roy is bad news, Ramis shifts gears and spends the next twenty minutes following Charlie as he is dragged into the drinking binge of his friend, Pete (Oliver Platt).  It seems that Pete is married to Charlie’s ex-wife, but the two of them are still friends, bonded over their mutual hatred of the woman both of them have married.  The scenes between Charlie and Pete are often hilarious, but they also serve to show the fear that Charlie felt of being swallowed up in the family life, something he never believed he could handle.  Seeing how Pete has gone downhill since he essentially took Charlie’s place in the family, only to wind up a miserable drunk, Charlie feels that his decision to abandon his family and not to feel guilt was a sound one.  As he puts it at one point: “It is futile to regret.”

But this cavalier attitude is tested time and again as the film rolls along, forcing Charlie to examine the deadly consequences his initial decision to steal from Bill has led to.  As the cowardly and amoral Charlie finds the morality and backbone that he thought he had lost forever, he finds himself acknowledging that his belief system is flawed.  But as Ramis makes abundantly clear, this realization is not the same thing as redemption.

That’s a hell of an arc for an actor to play, and Cusack nails it.  He tweaks his slightly smarmy, nice guy routine to make Charlie the ultimate sad sack.  He may talk a good game about the futility of regret, but as he encounters the ghosts of his past and the escalating horrors of his present, the overwhelming weight of a lifetime of bad choices plays across his face in beautiful, subtle moments.  From the pity he shows Pete to the fear he feels in the presence of the increasingly unstable Vic, Cusack is able to convey everything his character is thinking with his expressive face.  You could practically watch the movie on mute and still understand what is happening.

But I do not recommend muting this movie.  You would miss some of the sharpest dialogue this side of Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network.  Benton and Russo (working from the novel by Scott Phillips) provide line after brilliant line for not only Cusack, but also Thornton, Platt, and Quaid.  Ranging from Vic’s caustic one-liners to Pete’s sadly sincere expressions of regret about his marriage, there’s never a false note in the dialogue.

While it’s Cusack’s show, every member of the cast must have realized how good the script is because they all bring their A-game.  Thornton taps into his blunt, caustic Bad Santa performance to make Vic simultaneously hilarious and frightening.  The sadistic glee he shows at turning the tables on Roy is something to behold.  Platt hams it up nicely as the oft-drunk Pete, but he understands that people are often at their most honest when under the influence.  He also perfectly captures Pete’s swings between jovial celebration and self-pity.  Quaid proves a surprisingly scary villain.  While his dialogue is quite funny, he plays Bill’s anger and murderous intentions for real, lending a true element of danger to the film just when it needs it.  Even less important supporting characters like Sidney (Ned Bellamy), a bartender with anger-control issues, is given a sense of actual humanity through the excellent writing and Bellamy’s demented performance.

I know that some people may complain that we never see how Charlie and Vic manage to steal the money or how certain plot twists transpire.  The simple answer to the first charge is that it doesn’t matter.  The film isn’t about a heist, it’s about the sober realization that getting away with a crime is far more difficult than committing the actual crime.  As far as not learning about how some of the plot twists happen–I found that refreshing.  The film follows Charlie as he often stumbles into the aftermath of violence and other absurdities.  The audience only knows what Charlie knows and since he’s in survival mode, I found it believable that he wouldn’t ask a lot of questions about how a character wound up stuffed in a trunk.  If anything, I find that Charlie’s acceptance of such bizarre facts contributes to the suspense and very dark humor.

Backed by great cinematography from Alar Kivilo and an atmospheric score by David Kitay, Ramis walks a tonally difficult tightrope to offer up something original.  The Ice Harvest is unlike any other film he has taken on.  Maybe the expectations for a laugh-out loud comedy are why it bombed at the box office, but that’s no reason to consider the film a failure.  Quite the opposite, this is a great film that deserves to be seen.

NOTE: The following trailer is the only one I could find.  It completely misses the tone of the film and is mostly made up of material that wound up on the cutting room floor.  I feel this massively miscalculated bit of marketing contributed to the film’s anemic showing at the box office.

Criminally Ignored: The TV Set (2007)

I suppose it’s almost a miracle that writer/producer/director Jake Kasdan is still allowed to make movies.  From Zero Effect to Freaks and Geeks to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Kasdan has brought his apparent jinx to several films and TV series over the past fifteen years.  Perhaps he’s still allowed to work because the failure of these projects to find an audience at the time they were presented to the public is not his fault.  He’s done great work on everything he’s touched, leading those projects to become cult favorites after audiences caught up to them.

But being told your work is best viewed after several years has elapsed has to be the ultimate backhanded compliment.  Sure, it probably feels nice to eventually be vindicated, but in the “What have you done for me lately?” world of film and television production, it can only really lead to frustration.  This frustration surely fed into The TV Set, Kasdan’s bitter satire about the network television development process.  It’s readily apparent that the film is a personal project for Kasdan (it’s based on his experience working on Freaks and Geeks and attempting to turn Zero Effect into a television series), but it’s also a universal look into the compromise between art and commerce and how that compromise can quickly turn into bullying when commerce holds all the power.  The fact that it has failed to generate the kind of fervent cult following that Zero Effect and Freaks and Geeks has amassed could have something to do with the cynicism on display, but that’s no excuse for the cold shoulder it received upon its release or its inability to find an audience on DVD.

Mike Klein (David Duchovny) is a television lifer.  He has put in his time as a staff writer on various TV shows and has finally worked himself into the position to create his own show.  Working from the tragedy of his brother’s suicide, Mike writes a pilot script that everyone loves.  From Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), the president of the network, to Richard (Ioan Gruffudd), the head of programming, everyone agrees that Mike’s script is the best one of that pilot season.  Now they just have to beat all the originality and creativity out of it.

The slow slide into mediocrity begins when Mike’s first choice to play the lead is overruled by Lenny in favor of Zach (Fran Kranz), a hack actor whose range stretches from over-the-top to way-over-the-top.  Mike accepts this compromise after Lenny not-so-subtly threatens to kill the pilot if he doesn’t cast Zach.  Resigning himself to working with a less talented actor, Mike throws himself into production.

But between Zach’s inability to maintain a consistent tone, a director (Willie Garson) who can’t stay on schedule, a surly director of photography (M.C. Gainey), a leading lady (Lindsay Sloane) who simultaneously flirts with and rejects a confused Zach, and Lenny applying constant pressure to drop the suicide of the main character’s brother–the inciting incident of the entire show, Mike starts to crack under the pressure.  Instead of standing up to Lenny and her idiotic demands, he caves time and again, watering down and homogenizing his script until it’s barely a ghost of what he started with.

If this all sounds like entertainment industry navel-gazing and sour grapes, I suppose it is.  But it’s intriguing, entertaining navel-gazing and sour grapes, and that’s what matters.

Kasdan doesn’t forget that the average audience member doesn’t understand the ins and outs of television pilot season.  The film opens with some cleverly animated graphics that quickly explains how pilot scripts are commissioned, how many are shot, and just how few ever actually make it on the air.  He then provides the audience with a relatable protagonist in the person of Mike.

I’ve never seen such a realistic portrayal of a writer on film.  By turns cynical, depressed, hopeful, enthusiastic, and nervous, Mike is like several writers I know personally.  He’s not the most socially aware guy in the world, but neither is he an antisocial dweeb, wallowing in frustration.  While there are self-pitying aspects to his personality, he never comes across as an ungrateful wimp.  He knows he has chosen this life and that he has a job to do to support his family.  He’s also well aware that his fight to maintain at least a small part of his original vision is bound to make him sound like a self-important jerk.  Duchovny captures all these competing personality traits and gives Mike a self-effacing sense of humor and sadness that centers the film, allowing Kasdan to skewer the absurdity of network television executives in the form of Lenny and her cavalcade of yes-men.

If the story had the possibility to contain a weak spot, it was in the potentially thin character of Lenny.  But Weaver is so straight-faced and sincere in her passive-aggressiveness that she sells even the most outrageous of lines.  I don’t want to spoil too many of Lenny’s ridiculous thoughts, but I’ll share just a few to give you a taste:

“Everyone always wonders, can Xena be funny?  And I’m the person who’s saying: Fuck, yes!  Let’s do it!  I’ve always believed that Lucy Lawless has a great half-hour comedy in her!”

“It’s true, they’re both attractive, but Laurel is also really cute and I think that’s a good thing.  She doesn’t let her cuteness get in the way of her hotness and that’s really special to me.  Also, I think that Jesse has fake breasts and I believe that over the life of a series, the audience can feel that.”

“It’s a sexier version of the same thing, only they have Carmen Electra and a better concept.”

Kasdan’s contempt for Lenny and her ilk is palpable and he tries to cut this acidity by having Richard attempt to act as her conscience.  Brought in from a successful tenure as the head of programming at BBC, Richard is supposed to be the voice of the artist within Lenny’s inner circle.  But he quickly realizes that Lenny is a nearly unstoppable force and his instinct to always protect the writer could quickly lose him his job.  It’s an interesting back-and-forth to watch Mike and Richard both betray their ideals and see the different effect it has on each man.

Beyond the horrors of production and dealing with obtrusive network notes, Kasdan also gives the viewer a glimpse into the everyday frustrations of working in the television industry.  From Alice (Judy Greer), Mike’s chipper, double-talking manager to the toll it takes on everyone’s family life to the uselessness of audience testing, the film aims at many targets and scores a bullseye with all of them.

The TV Set received a barely there release in 2007.  While it was hardly the stuff that blockbusters are made of, it deserved a better fate than it ultimately received.  It’s failure to find an audience on DVD confounds me.  While it is very specific in its targeting of the networks and their fear of anything that shows any originality, it remains a very funny movie with just enough broad jokes (the network’s biggest hit is a reality show called Slut Wars) to appeal to the mainstream while remaining a cautionary tale to aspiring Hollywood scribes to be careful what they wish for.  It is an incredibly bitter film, but like most of Kasdan’s work, it’s well worth seeking out.

Criminally Ignored: The Last Winter (2007)

It’s a very risky project when a filmmaker tries to make a genre film that wears a political message on its sleeve.  But that’s exactly what co-writer/producer/director Larry Fessenden did with The Last Winter.  Unlike other films that have attempted to merge an ecological message with horror elements (I’m looking at you The Happening), Fessenden did a smart thing and focused on making a good horror movie with interesting characters.  He then sprinkled in timely arguments against drilling in Alaska’s Wildlife Refuge for oil by suggesting that Mother Nature will only be pushed so far before she reacts violently and slaps the shit out of the human race for its shortsighted arrogance.  If you find yourself on the other side of this argument, it’s doubtful that anything Fessenden presents in the film will change your mind.  But, if you’re like me, you believe that it’s only a matter of time before we use up the available fossil fuels and find ourselves sinking into anarchy because we didn’t properly perfect alternate, renewable forms of energy.  If that’s the way you think, The Last Winter is a frightening film.

A stellar cast is headed up by Ron Perlman as Ed Pollack, the head of an exploratory group working for an oil company that has been given rights to drill for oil in the frozen Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.  The group’s job is to determine if an ice road can safely be built into the area without harming the environment.  Pollack couldn’t care less if the environment is harmed.  He strictly views his job through the prism of achieving one goal: get the oil out of the ground as quickly as possible.

Doing his best to slow Pollack down and consider all the options is James Hoffman (James LeGros), an environmentalist hired by the oil company to appease the people protesting against their drilling in the Refuge.  Hoffman finds troublingly high temperatures for wintertime in the Arctic.  The temperatures are so high, he sees no way that an ice road can be constructed without doing serious damage to the environment and refuses to sign off on the project, no matter how much Pollack pressures him.

Caught in the middle of the power struggle between these two strong-willed men are: Abby (Connie Britton), Pollack’s right-hand woman, who just happens to be his ex-girlfriend–oh yeah, she’s now sleeping with Hoffman; Maxwell (Zack Gilford), the unstable greenhorn who is the son of Pollack’s best friend; Motor (Kevin Corrigan), the pot-smoking mechanic who just wants to be left alone; Elliot (Jamie Harrold), Hoffman’s less than levelheaded assistant; and Lee (Pato Hoffman) and Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah), two Native-American members of the group serving, respectively, as guide and cook.

When bizarre things (beyond February rainfall north of the Arctic Circle) begin to plague the camp, tensions between Pollack and Hoffman come to a boil.  Are the noises that sound like a herd of cattle stampeding through the darkness of the night sky only in Hoffman’s head or are they real?  The fact that Maxwell hears the same noises points to their reality, but Maxwell isn’t the sanest member of the crew.  So how to explain things?  Is it just the stress of being in one of the remotest places in the world causing shared hallucinations that slowly overtake the members of the crew?  Is sour gas–methane gas released by the thawing permafrost–leading to the erratic behavior?  Or is the planet striking back at the human race for infringing on its last, unspoiled patch of land?  Fessenden refuses to offer up a pat explanation to these questions.  This ambiguity only escalates the tension, making the film an almost unbearable exercise in suspense.

Despite being set in one of the most wide-open parts of the world, The Last Winter is a masterpiece of claustrophobic horror.  Fessenden employs the same brilliant technique that John Carpenter used for The Thing of contrasting the flat, white expanse of the outdoors with the cramped quarters that the crew share.  When your only shelter from a harsh environment is a series of rickety buildings filled with people you can’t stand, the world suddenly seems a very small place.  Fessenden further accentuates this uncomfortable situation by giving every character enough unspoken baggage to keep their motivations from ever being fully revealed.  This leads to plenty of shifting alliances among the supporting characters and keeps Hoffman from being a straight-up good guy and Pollack from devolving into a pure villain.

Of course, the acting helps color in the shades of grey that the script only hints at.  LeGros gives Hoffman a nervous, shifty-eyed energy that offsets his frustration about the fact the people don’t seem to care when he shouts warnings of environmental doom.  While Fessenden certainly sides with Hoffman’s view of the situation, Le Gros doesn’t make him an easy hero to root for just because he comes across as so damn twitchy.  Perlman adds enough forceful authority to the blustering Pollack to make the audience look to him as a possible savior for the crew when things go from bad to worse as bodies start dropping.  But perhaps the best performance in the film comes from Britton as the inscrutable Abby.  It’s never clear if she’s sleeping with Hoffman out of convenience, to spite Pollack, or to steer the environmentalist in the direction of getting in line with the company.  She spends so much of the film playing both of the men that she could have quickly become a villain, but instead emerges as the only levelheaded member of the crew due to Britton’s quiet authority.

More than anything else, The Last Winter is a great horror film.  Using remote locations in Iceland to double for Alaska, Fessenden and cinematographer G. Magni Ágústsson are able to create a threatening environment by just framing the characters as insignificant shapes against the overwhelming landscape.  At the same time, the truly creepy score by Jeff Grace and various audio effects layer over each other to lend an apocalyptic feel to the film that is hard to describe as anything other than unnerving.  Each time I watch the film, by the time the trippy climax and resolution play out, I feel like I just witnessed the beginning of the end of the human race.  That’s a hell of an achievement for a low-budget horror flick to pull off.

I’m at a loss to explain why The Last Winter has not gathered more of a following.  Fessenden is a well-liked independent horror guru (he has also directed the terrific films Habit and Wendigo, in addition to producing and acting in several no-budget experimental horror projects), the cast is uniformly great, and the technical aspects of the film are topnotch.  So why was it dumped in a few theaters at the same time that it was offered on-demand?  Is it the fact that the film takes a strong stand against oil drilling in such an environmentally sensitive area?  I know that general audiences have grown weary of political statements in movies, but Fessenden skillfully weaves his arguments into the dialogue and actions that move the horror plot forward.  Yes, it’s a message movie, but Fessenden never lets the message get in the way of the story.

The Last Winter is a film that any classic horror fan should love.  It may take its time building tension, but once all hell breaks loose, it really becomes one of the more powerful films of the last five years.

Criminally Ignored

On Friday, I’ll be introducing Criminally Ignored, a new column dedicated to great films that either received no theatrical or barely there theatrical releases.  While this sounds like a wide net I’m casting, the idea is to narrow things down by focusing on movies that no one saw and have failed to become cult favorites on home video.  For example, as much as I enjoy the movie Idiocracy, it’s found an appreciative audience on DVD.  Instead, the first film I’ll cover will be Larry Fessenden’s brilliant eco-horror flick The Last Winter, a film that was ignored in its brief theatrical run and has somehow failed to find an audience despite its topical subject matter and great execution.