Petey, the scrawny gray dog in “Thin Ice,” appears meek and harmless, yet when protagonist Mickey holds out his hand, Petey suddenly bursts into vicious barking. Deceptive Petey serves as an allegory for the whole film: It is misleadingly calm at first, only to bare its claws without warning.
Just as its title implies, “Thin Ice” takes place in the bleak, frozen winter of Wisconsin, and its plot involves an insurance salesman, Mickey Prohaska (Greg Kinnear), who is going after a valuable belonging of his client’s (Alan Arkin). However, Mickey’s plan spirals way out of control when a locksmith (Billy Crudup) with an unstable personality interferes.
Before Crudup’s character, Randy, appears, the film paints a picture of mundane suburban life in the winter. Mickey’s life seems to be dragged down by unresolved conflicts: his crumbling business, his harrowed and estranged wife and Arkin’s amusingly stubborn character Gorvy, who refuses to buy insurance until he hears it will cover his dysfunctional TV.
When Randy smashes a man to death with a hammer in Gorvy’s home, the atmosphere of the film takes a complete turn. Instead of merely being a nuisance, the slippery snow and ice suddenly become a threatening and obstructive environment, and the dull Midwestern town suddenly seems suffocating. And from there, the audience sees Kinnear transform his character from a confident and pragmatic salesman to a sweaty, nervous mess of a man, helplessly tied to a murder.
Crudup’s performance is the major highlight of the film. He delivers a performance that is irreverent and insensitive, just like a lake frosted over with thin ice: One misstep will send any person plummeting through its unstable surface into indifferent fatality.
The most outstanding moments of Crudup’s performance always come with bleak humor. When Mickey and Randy have to dispose of the body and find that the hole in the frozen lake is not big enough, Randy points toward the body and concludes lightly, “So that has to get smaller!” Another brilliant instance shows Mickey confronting Randy about stealing Gorvy’s clock at the crime scene. Randy replies searingly, “It was my mother’s birthday, OK?”
But even Crudup’s role as a mischievously handsome and flippant criminal cannot elevate the film’s resolution. It isn’t entirely anticlimactic, but the morbid excitement of the movie does dwindle over time. All the rest of the revelations are told through the lazy narration of the protagonist. “Thin Ice” is, overall, an ambitious story of fraud and blackmail, yet it could have been superb if its driving plotline was resolved in an equally compelling climax.
““ Jason Chen
Email Chen at
zchen@media.ucla.edu.