we never achieve any real insight into his sensibility
SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Richard Kuklinski was as close to a genuine monster as real life offers up: a sociopath from New Jersey who rose from bottom-feeder beginnings—bootlegging one-reel porno flicks for the Mob—to become one of their most implacable assassins. They recognised something in him: an essential coldness. A blank indifference to human life which they sensed could be put to better use.
He died in prison in 2006—but not before inspiring a bestselling non-fiction account (Anthony Bruno’s The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer) and an HBO documentary. He is believed to have committed his first murder while in his teens, and altogether may have killed between 100 and 250 people—all the while keeping his activities hidden from his wife and two daughters, who appear to have accepted without question his cover-story of life as a Wall Street trader.
He’s memorably incarnated here by Michael Shannon, one of the most imposing character actors in contemporary American cinema, whose massive frame and flattened features seem carved, none too elegantly, out of raw stone; in profile, he looks a lot like Thanos from Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel comics.
Like a lot of big men (I’m thinking in particular of Robert Ryan), Shannon is aware that the mere fact of his presence carries an awful lot of weight onscreen, and uses silence and stillness accordingly. A primarily reactive actor, he can make simply listening seem like an act of aggression. His eyes narrow into slits, and he allows his features to settle into a mask-like impassivity; at such moments, he seems capable of sudden and devastating violence. (Which only make his rare forays into a more manic register—in William Friedkin’s Bug, for example, which he originated brilliantly on Broadway, or in the final reels of Take Shelter—seem all the more disturbing.)
An ideal choice for a sociopathic mass murderer, you would think. But Shannon’s take on Kuklinski is so oblique, and the script so concerned with point-to-point plotting at the expense of deeper character development, that we never achieve any real insight into his sensibility, and how it might (or might not) have evolved, over the more than twenty years the film chronicles; nor, alas, do we feel even the remotest bit of curiosity. Instead we merely tag along, following him doggedly through the decades, from one hit to the next. Lapels grow wider, sideburns longer . . . still, we remain resolutely outside of our subject. He’s a killing machine, remorseless and unvarying, and every encounter ends in much the same way, to the point of monotony.
Had this been the point, it would have constituted a bold artistic decision, reminiscent of John Naughton’s classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Unfortunately, the film wants to have it both ways, and so we’re also given hints of a deeper, if somewhat strangulated sensibility—not just his ferocious, tongue-tied love for his wife and daughters, but also the revelation, about halfway through the film, of some weird moral code: he won’t kill women or children, apparently. (As such, it rather contradicts the pitiless executioner we’ve seen to that point.) To compound the problem, we’re treated to a badly misjudged flashback—to his childhood, his violently abusive father. Look, the film seems to be saying, this is why he became the way he did. It feels contrived, and altogether too neat.
The real problem, however, lies with the direction. Which is not bad, by any means, but if you’re setting a crime drama amid the East Coast mafia during the 1960s and '70s, and you’re casting Ray Liotta, then you’re practically inviting comparisons you might do better to avoid. And this, alas, is where The Iceman falls flat. Where Scorsese’s Goodfellas is intensely cinematic, all pop and sizzle, this one is far more workmanlike: there’s never a shot that pulls you up in admiration, never an edit that calls attention to itself. Yet the burden of precedent remains, ensuring that what might, in another film, be considered good sober restraint, here seems dutiful, pedestrian and wan.
Likewise the tone, which is unrelievedly dour throughout. There’s none of the mordant wit of a Boogie Nights, none of the wide-eyed, coked-out exuberance of De Palma’s Scarface. Only one scene really surprises—describing the final moments of a lowlife (the seemingly inescapable James Franco), who, immediately before his execution, lapses into a desperate, stammering prayer. The entire notion of a god seems inexplicable to Kuklinski—who’s nothing if not the incarnation of a rudderless, existential universe—and, amused, he lets his victim continue for a few minutes. If God exists, he says, then fine. Let him stop me.
He doesn’t.
The production values are understated but strong, the song-choices signify satisfactorily, and among the supporting cast, both Ray Liotta (as a short-tempered underboss) and Chris Evans (as another unaffiliated hitman, all but unrecognisable beneath long stringy hair and a ratty moustache) are good. The real revelation, though, is Winona Ryder as Deborah Kuklinski, more committed and compelling than she’s been for many years. She invests her role—essentially, a baffled but loving suburban wife—with genuine pathos; watching, you remember again what an indelible presence she was in early '90s American cinema, and how badly she’s been missed.
