So, Erasmus finally got some time on airplanes to read a bit, and got through Scott Phillips’ Ice Harvest, the movie of which didn’t impress Erasmus much. The book, mirabile dictu, is much better. Phillips’ Charlie Arglist is a far less sympathetic fellow than John Cusack’s hang-dong criminal manqué. Most tellingly, he’s been dealing coke behind Bill Gerard’s back, the proceeds of which comprise the majority of the money he and Vic plan to abscond with. Moreover, his personal life is rather more sordid and squalid than the in the movie. Most tellingly, in the book, Arglist deliberately kills his partner in crime, rather than passively letting him die. One wonders if Cusack, like many actors, requested that his character be made more sympathetic (and idiosyncratic: the graffito motif in the film appears nowhere in the book). If so, indulging that whim was a signal failure on the part of the scenarist, as was removing Arglist’s meeting with Nemesis at the story’s end.
Just as remaking Arglist into a nice-guy mob-lawyer thief undermines the narrative, so does its playing up Pete van Heuten in order to give Oliver Platt a more comedic, sympathetic rôle. The book’s van Heuten is Arglist’s brother-in-law, not the husband of Arglist’s cold ex-wife who begs him for deliverance from his wealthy domesticity.
Some of the movie’s more dramatic grotesqueries, like Vic’s wife kneeling dead before the Christmas tree, and the black-comic scene with the dying hitman Roy Gelles on the pier, prove to be pure inventions of the filmmakers, and ones which also undermine the reality of the narrative, perhaps reflecting the filmmakers’ desire to venture into Terra Cohen-ita. Unfortunately, their expedition founders and is ultimately lost in the very nihilism they’ve courted.
Phillips’ book, by contrast, is a lovely, dark, satisfying little work of crime fiction, in which a bunch of low-level low-lifes plot, scheme, betray, and murder each other, with only death and ruin left behind. Phillips, it turns out, knows the gods are not mocked.
The Ice Harvest, Liber, placet.
