Movies
Ramis turns dark for Christmas movie
By Richard Satran
Nov 21, 2005, 18:09

NEW YORK (Reuters) - From writing "Animal House" and "Ghostbusters" to directing "Groundhog Day" and "Analyze This," Harold Ramis is one of Hollywood's funniest talents.

Now he's made his first serious movie, but he can't quite let the funny stuff go.

"The Ice Harvest," his new movie has been described as a comic thriller or a noir comedy.

But the director shuns such definitions for his new film: "I just let the characters in the movie tell the story and I didn't really worry about genre."

But he admits the murder-filled tale about a failed heist in Wichita, Kansas, over on a snowy Christmas eve, "is the darkest thing I've ever done."

"The laughs are as big as any film he's ever made," said the movie's star, John Cusack, sitting next to Ramis over lunch at the Regency Hotel on New York's Park Avenue. "And yet, it kind of creeps you out -- the tension is real high."

Opening on Wednesday, Ice Harvest has been among the most anticipated of the holiday film season partly because it puts so much talent together.

In addition to the well known director, the movie's screenplay was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo, who wrote "Empire Falls," and Academy Award-winning writer/director Robert Benton, who directed "Kramer vs Kramer" and "The Human Stain."

It also brings into the mix a star of Christmas past -- actor Billy Bob Thornton, whose Santa-suited cursing conman in the 2003 hit "Bad Santa" showed that holiday movies from the seamy side can succeed.

GREED, WEATHER, LUCK

Thornton is the smooth-talking movie sidekick to Cusack, who plays loser lawyer Charlie Arglist stuck in a town that's "just nowhere," Ramis said.

Like the weatherman played by Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day," who just can't get out of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Cusack's Charlie is unable to escape Wichita.

On a snowy Christmas eve, Charlie has embezzled $2 million from his mobster boss with partner-in-crime Vic Cavanaugh, played by Thornton. Their plan to use the holiday to cover their getaway gets iced by greed, bad weather and bad luck, as they stumble through Kansas cocktail lounges and strip clubs into betrayal and violence.

"This moral blankness feels even more ironic when you're in the celebration of Christmas. It's the season of warmth and loving and giving and family. And these guys have none of it," Ramis said.

"Everything is heightened by the holiday," Cusack added. "If things are going great it's a great time. But if things are going badly it can be the worst time in your life."

Some early reviews have already raised concerns that the movie goes through too many jarring shifts from comedy to drama. The film "never convinces us that its main characters belong in this seamy world," The Hollywood Reporter wrote.

Whether holiday filmgoers flock to a Christmas story as dark as "Ice Harvest" remains to be seen. But Cusack applauded the director for taking on an ambitious theme with a "genre-bending" movie that "holds surprises" for its audience.

Ramis said he was drawn to the story "as a filmgoer and a filmmaker." Based on a novel by Scott Phillips, the story, he says, avoids typical Hollywood formulas.

"I love the unpredictability of this story," Ramis said. "If I am in a theater and I know where its going, I don't know why I'm there. That's not this film."

Will the movie be too unpredictable and too loopy for holiday audiences? Ramis concedes that Hollywood's marketers like clear genres, not genre-benders. And the holiday season itself has a predictability that people like. "They're still doing 'The Nutcracker,'" Ramis noted.



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