Ariel Vroman (2012)
Is the protagonist a psychopathic personality, who fits like a glove into the organised crime structure that employs him? Or is he a psychologically disturbed individual with a tendency for uncontrollable anger and violence but with the capacity to feel and express other, more positive emotions too – someone who had the bad luck to be picked up by mob talent-spotters? Richard ‘The Iceman’ Kuklinski (1935-2006) was a Mafia hitman, who continued to live with his wife and daughters in a New Jersey suburb until his arrest in 1986. Ariel Vroman’s film largely polarises Kuklinski’s professional and private lives as if it’s amazing that he was a family man and a hood at the same time – even though this seems par for the course in a gangster movie. In any case, Vroman and Morgan Land, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay (adapted from a book by Anthony Bruno, The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-blooded Killer), forget this distinction when it suits them – and in order not to let slip any opportunity for mayhem, or the threat of mayhem. Driving his wife and daughters back from a family outing to a skating rink, Kuklinski is infuriated by another driver. His rage is an aberration, in terms of his behaviour in front of his children up to this point, but it makes for a good car chase.
In other words, it’s not only Richard Kuklinski who blanks out experiences that should be emotionally unforgettable – so do the filmmakers. If his fit of road rage, which terrifies the two daughters, is the first time that he’s shown a violent side to his family, it’s incredible that it has no residue in terms of how the girls see their father. The only (remote) follow-up occurs when Kuklinski starts smashing the house up before expressing his love for his wife and children – they are ‘all that matters’: this scene ends with the wife apologising. Later on, his elder daughter is the victim of a hit and run that isn’t an accident – but there’s no explanation of whether she recovers and, if she does, what she has to say or feels about what’s happened. Ariel Vroman just moves on to the next killing.
The script is sloppy in terms of timeframe. In 1966 Kuklinski’s wife Deborah refers to ‘Vice-President Nixon’ – I wish I believed this demonstrated the character’s forgetfulness rather than the writers’. At this stage, the elder child is a babe in arms but we then see a television news report of the American withdrawal from Vietnam (1975 at the latest) and the two daughters are both in their early teens. They look the same when the elder girl celebrates her sixteenth birthday (1979 at the earliest – ‘Heart of Glass’ is playing). Emulating the complexity of the relationship between the Mafia family and the family at home in The Godfather films is impossible; Ariel Vroman makes a poor fist of it, even so. There’s not enough detail to explain how the wife and daughters can believe (as they seem to) that spookily silent but solicitous Richard is a hard-working husband and father with a legal job. There’s no visual texture either: the home and the world both look dark but ghostly. The score by Haim Mazar has crescendo-itis.
Although Ariel Vroman can’t wait to impart sinister atmosphere, Michael Shannon and Winona Ryder have a real connection with each other in their opening scene. Richard and Deborah, before they are married, are having a drink in a bar. Later that evening, after he’s said goodnight to Deborah, Richard cuts a man’s throat in anger. He appears to keep his temper after that until he’s taken on by the Mafioso Roy DeMeo, played by Ray Liotta (doing what is by now his sadly usual, hollowly intense turn). The first killing that Kuklinski is asked by DeMeo to carry out – of a vagrant in the street, in broad daylight – is gripping because Kuklinski seems unsure what he’ll do. But after that the murders become as tiresome as they’re nasty. Given the opportunity, Michael Shannon is able to combine physical power and subtlety to an exceptional degree – he has next to no opportunity here. Shannon doesn’t look like an ordinary suburban family man to start with; Vroman wrecks his performance by lighting him to emphasise his intimidating aspect.
13 June 2013
