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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 3 |
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Laughter in the dark:
Bum formula for noir
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Given the "dark corridors" I walk professionally these days, I read a slew of mysteries, thrillers and roman noir novels each year. In the latter category, I'd have to say I thoroughly enjoyed "The Ice Harvest" by Richard Russo, an author I hadn't read before.
The book is a stirring example of contemporary crime noir, like "Mystic River" and "Layer Cake." Naturally, I was keyed up to see the movie, which came out in early December, right after I'd finished the book.
As it turned out, I was on a vacation trip when I finally saw "The Ice Harvest" and I cajoled the people I was with that day--my wife, my sister-in-law and my niece--to see the movie with me, conning them to skip the new films they all wanted to see. Bad idea. Ultimately, there was hell to pay for yours truly.
"The Ice Harvest" is a grim, cynical account by a small-time criminal lawyer of his attempt to rip off his employers with the help of his best friend, getting away with a big chunk of loot on Christmas Eve. There's hardly anybody in the novel who isn't a sleazeball of one kind or another. The lawyer helps the mob stay out of trouble with the string of strip joints it runs. He's well known to the local cops as the mouthpiece for various thugs, but they sort of respect him. So do the strippers, who are mainly dumb ladies being cheated and abused by nearly every man with whom they come in contact, except the lawyer.
When I finished the book, I asked myself, "Who am I supposed to like in this story?" The answer I found was "nobody," although the lawyer, who's trying to quit it all and get a new start in life, probably gets one's most favorable appraisal. Still, the narrative and the woeful stuff that happens to the lawyer and his pal that Christmas Eve kept me fascinated with this tale of lowlifes in modern times. I guess you want to root for anybody who's trying to shaft the mob, even if he's a grifter.
In "The Ice Harvest" and many crime noir novels like it, there's a certain amount of humor. I believe it's there to humanize the characters and to keep the reader from falling into a permanent depression. It is not there to get you laughing and keep you laughing through the final credits.
But the film version, directed by Harold Ramis, pushes the whole tale toward the humorous side--and you find yourself set up to laugh over some of the nastiest stuff you'll ever see on a movie screen, including gruesome murders.
Once I saw Ramis' name on the credits, I began to despair. This is a specialist in comedy, whose work dates back to the Second City comedy ensemble and his acting roles in films like "Ghostbusters." With John Cusack as the lawyer, Billy Bob Thornton as his sidekick and Randy Quaid as the mob topper, Ramis also had a cast heavily-laden with actors tuned to broad, comic portrayals.
The result is a horrible screwup of Russo's story, which loses its edge almost immediately and becomes a dark comic caper film which will alienate noir fans and bewilder those who came to see Cusack do something romantic and funny, but find him stealing and murdering.
One of the most egregious examples of what's wrong with the movie is Oliver Platt's portrayal of a terribly drunken local chap who decides to visit his estranged family on Christmas Eve, makes an awesome spectacle of himself in front of his children and ends up vomiting profusely all over the interior of Cusack's car. By the time this takes place, you'll be wondering why you paid to see this mess. (Don't blame Platt; he's doing what the script calls for, unfortunately.)
Almost everybody in the story betrays somebody and the ending, in which Cusack gets his comeuppance, comes like an embarrassing snip of irony tacked onto the story without much thought. (Russo's novel makes more of the finale, but not much more.)
"The Ice Harvest," the movie, is not doing well. Word of mouth is killing it and the reviews have been generally bad. Meanwhile, I owe three of the women in my family a whole lot of visits to insipid romantic comedies to make up for dragging them in to see "The Ice Harvest" with me.
©2006 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted Jan. 2, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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