Thin Ice: Review By harveycritic

THIN ICE

ATO Pictures

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B

Director: Jill Sprecher

Screenwriter: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher

Cast: Greg Kinnear, Billy Crudup, Lea Thompson, Alan Arkin, David Harbour, Bob Balaban

Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 2/8/12

Opens: February 17, 2012

The other day Jon Stewart's guest on the comedian's Daily Show was Brad Pitt. After announcing his name, the audience burst into sustained applause, to which Jon replied (comically) "No, not that Brad Pitt: he's an insurance salesman in Poughkeepsie." Insurance salesmen, then, are in a category that finds dentists and accountants, presumably professions peopled primarily by dorks. The salesman in Jill Sprecher's "Thin Ice," however, is anything but a dork, though by the time some of the people he meets do him harm he'd be happy if being a dork was the worst thing that could have happened to him.

Greg Kinnear is perfectly cast with a role that suits his personality to a T, that of a conniving insurance salesman, Mickey Prohaska, who has been spending too much time in hotels because he is separated from his wife, Jo Ann. He is enough of scammer to make us realize that when he tries to get back with her, sweet-talking his way into her bed, his only concern is to save money previously spent on hotels. Mickey gives motivational speeches advising his audience to ask people for the time as a way to start conversations that would inevitably lead to selling policies. He sees an easy victim--a slightly senile man in his eighties named Gorvy Hauer (Alan Arkin)--and looks forward to selling him a policy on his house not realizing that the man asked him over principally to have someone to talk to and to fix his TV set. The plot advances when a locksmith (Billy Crudup) arrives to install an alarm system, which would pay for itself by lowering Hauer's premiums.

By the time loose strings are tied up--and there are enough strings here to warrant a considerable work force of boy scouts or sailors--we get the message that this conniver could use peace of mind a lot more than the money he expects to get. Once a murder takes place right in Hauer's shack, implicating Mickey as an accessory, Mickey might have almost wished he were an honest man.

The ambiance will remind cinephiles of the broad stretches of ice in "Fargo." "Thin Ice" is filmed in Minnesota where, production notes state, the temperature often hit ten below, yet a sartorially splendid Mickey ambles about in the open air without a hat or gloves while others are covering almost in every inch of flesh with wool. This noir tale with heavy comic touches is exquisitely cast--friend of Hauer, Mickey's wife, Mickey's new employee, locksmith, Mickey wife, and a none-too-friendly mutt named Pete. The writer-director team of the Sprecher sisters, whose "Clockwatchers" (1997) pits two temps against a full-time staff, benefit from Dick Pope's good looking widescreen camera work and Alex Wurman and Bela Fleck's music. If there are too many coincidences to make the big twist plausible, that's a small caveat for a film with an ending that only a few in the audience will see coming.

Rated R. 94 minutes (c) 2012 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online