The Iceman movie review
In “The Iceman” Michael Shannon’s
mesmerizing portrayal of Richard Kuklinski, a notorious contract killer,
has the paradoxical quality, peculiar to many great screen
performances, of being unreadable and transparent. You can’t really see
through Richard, whose pale-blue eyes take in the world from a face as
expressionless as a sphinx. But in its tiniest tremors you can sense
explosive forces roiling below the mask and grasp the duality with a
visceral feeling of dread. It is a performance that has the same
life-or-death gravity Mr. Shannon brought to the role of a man driven half-mad by apocalyptic portents in “Take Shelter.”
Richard operates in the treacherous milieu
of Tony Soprano, but in an earlier era: the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. He is a
seething loner, and although not as bright, sociable or complicated as
James Gandolfini’s Tony, the two have one crucial similarity: Both are
fiercely devoted family men who go to great lengths to shield their
loved ones from the dirty reality of their work. Richard is so secretive
that late in the movie when mobsters pay him an unannounced house call,
he is dismayed to discover that they know the exact location of his
home in suburban New Jersey.
Where “The Sopranos” and its close cinematic
equivalent, “Goodfellas,” are warmblooded explorations of violent men
bonding, “The Iceman,” directed by Ariel Vromen
from a screenplay he wrote with Morgan Land, is as cold as the nickname
of its title character. Its story is based on Anthony Bruno’s novel,
“The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer,” and the 1992 HBO
documentary, “The Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer.”
The real-life Kuklinski claimed to have
committed his first murder as a young teenager. He was convicted of many
contract killings for various New York-area crime organizations in
1988. He died in 2006.
Estimates of the number of his victims range from 100 to 250. The movie
was shot in Shreveport, La., which convincingly doubles for New York
and New Jersey.
Richard is bootlegging pornographic movies
for the Mafia when he marries Deborah Pellicotti (Winona Ryder), whom he
meets in the early 1960s and woos by telling her she “is prettier than
Natalie Wood.” She thinks that he makes his living dubbing Disney
cartoons.
The first sign of his terrifying
possessiveness and rage is his murder of a bar patron who makes a crude
remark about Deborah. Playing a slavishly devoted wife who refuses to
face the truth even when it stares her in the face, Ms. Ryder gives her
deepest screen performance in years.
Richard’s opportunities expand when Roy
DeMeo (Ray Liotta), a crime lord flanked by two minions, Josh Rosenthal
(David Schwimmer) and Mickey Scicoli (John Ventimiglia), visits his
shabby studio and threatens his life for being late on a delivery.
Impressed by Richard’s composure with a gun pointed at him, Roy enlists
him as his personal hit man. Richard’s fortunes quickly rise (he tells
Deborah he is working on Wall Street), and the Kuklinskis move to a
comfortable home in the suburbs and have two daughters.
When mob politics interrupt the relationship
with Roy, Richard teams up with another contract killer, Robert Pronge,
a k a Mr. Freezy (an unrecognizable Chris Evans), who drives an ice
cream truck and freezes the bodies of his victims before disposing of
them. The two experiment with using cyanide spray as an undetectable
murder weapon inside a nightclub. Roy ultimately discovers that Richard
is working without his permission and comes calling.
“The Iceman” knows what it is and what it’s
not. It doesn’t strive for the operatic grandeur of the “Godfather”
movies or for the tragicomic flair of Martin Scorsese’s mobster movies.
Its bleak, ominous atmosphere derives from its central character. The
movie’s cool desaturated color lends it the look and feel of a
television documentary, but there is a difference. Bobby Bukowski’s
cinematography and Nathan Amondson’s production design sustain a look of
deep grunge in which the characters are almost swallowed up in
darkness.
Cameo performances from Stephen Dorff as
Richard’s violent brother Joey, incarcerated in a New Jersey prison, and
James Franco as one of Richard’s victims illuminate this extremely
well-acted film like struck matches. The scene in which Richard visits
Joey and they both explode with murderous rage triggers a flashback of a
vicious childhood beating. When Mr. Franco’s doomed character prays to
God to save his life, Richard cruelly grants him a half-hour grace
period for God to intervene.
If the narrow biographical focus of “The
Iceman” prevents it from being a great crime movie, on its own more
modest terms it is an indelible film that clinches Mr. Shannon’s status
as a major screen actor.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/movies/the-iceman-with-michael-shannon-as-richard-kuklinski.html?_r=0
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