Financially strapped small-town Wisconsin insurance agent Greg Kinnear thinks he sees a way out of his troubles: a rare violin, owned by absent-minded bachelor farmer Alan Arkin, who promises to pass along the instrument if Kinnear helps him run some errands. Kinnear knows music-shop owner Bob Balaban will offer $25,000 for the violinâ€"money he could use to put a dent in his debts and maybe attend his company’s annual convention in Arubaâ€"but then Kinnear gets greedy and asks for an appraisal, and conspires to sneak into Arkin’s house to swap the good violin with a dummy. That’s when he crosses paths with Billy Crudup, an ex-con security-alarm installer who senses right away that Kinnear is up to something, and wants a piece of the action.
That’s the setup for Thin Ice, a twisty comic noir by writer-director Jill Sprecher and her sister and co-writer Karen Sprecher; the duo previously collaborated on the well-regarded indies Clockwatchers and Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. But the setup alone doesn’t do justice to the hard turns Thin Ice takes, any more than comparisons to the Coen brothers’ similarly snowbound and sardonic Fargo fully explains what this movie is. Yes, Kinnear’s desperation resembles William H. Macy’s money woes in Fargo, and yes, Crudup gives a jittery performance not unlike Steve Buscemi’s. But Thin Ice has plenty of its own surprises to spring, as it charts how a man who spends his life playing the angles can miss the hard brick wall he’s about to smash into. Watch Thin Ice Movie Online
In fact, the biggest problem with Thin Ice is that by the end, it becomes something of a surprise-delivery device, without much of a point, per se. Also, the movie takes some dark, violent turns once Crudup enters the picture, and loses some of its initial soft, regional charm. But Kinnear and Crudup are funny, and the plot does fold together with the kind of cruel logic that these sorts of twist-a-thons often lack. And the Sprechers have a keen eye and ear for the details that define their hero, whether it’s the way he keeps stumbling over clumps of snow, his “MVP2†license plate (because someone else got “MVPâ€), or his grumbling that in his town, there are only two seasons: “Winter and roadwork.â€
Mickey never takes his eyes off the prize, but getting it will require considerable conning and cunning if he has any hope of outwitting Gorvy, Bob and that a brand new alarm system Randy (Billy Crudup) put in. The one thing Mickey has never run out of is hope. He has, however, run out of luck, with a series of complications that include the slightly unhinged Randy as an unwanted partner in crime. "Fargo"-esque in its outlook, "Thin Ice" toys with all the ways greed and avarice can trip up someone like Mickey. There are ironies aplenty for him to weather, to say nothing of a few dicey, desperate hours on a frozen lake.
The Sprechers, whose last film was 2002's festival favorite, "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing," which also featured Arkin, are fond of ensemble pieces with lots of interlocking action. They take time to mine the psychological and the physical world the characters have been dropped into. For "Thin Ice," the filmmakers have gone back to familiar turf (Jill graduated from the University of Wisconsin) and captured the sensibility of small-town life there with its limitless horizons and limited opportunities. The bitter winter is a good staging ground for delivering this bitter pill, with their "Thirteen Conversations" cinematographer Dick Pope ("The Illusionist") helping them make the most of the icy vistas.
A perpetually bundled-up Arkin looks to be having a grand time letting Gorvy's mind flounder. Crudup brings a real fervor to his psychosis, Balaban a nervous industry to his appraiser, indeed just about everyone and the dog (there really is a dog) in this rangy cast take a nice spin on the ice. Watch Thin Ice Movie Online
The mischief and the mayhem hang on Mickey's growing unease. Which makes it a good fit for Kinnear, whose characters often harbor a nagging sense that something is terribly wrong stretching back to "As Good as It Gets" in 1997 through 2006's "Little Miss Sunshine" and beyond. He's at it again in "Thin Ice," brow furrowed, shoulders slumping, voice shifting between desperation and consternation. Not quite as good as it gets, but close.
