“He lies artfully and constantly, with absolutely no sense of guilt that might give him away in body language or facial expression. If charm, sexuality and role-playing somehow fail, [he] uses fear, a sure winner. His iciness is fundamentally scary.
— Psychologist Martha Stout, in her best-seller The Sociopath Next Door
The person described in this quote is a composite version of an “exemplary sociopath,” or, as we call them these days, psychopaths. The author may as well have been describing Mickey Prohaska, the character played by Greg Kinnear in the new indie film Thin Ice.
The term “psychopath” conjures images of bloodlusting madmen, trenchcoat-wearing school shooters and glamorous cinematic cannibals, when the fact is, most of these remorseless, mentally imbalanced people are high-functioning, and their ruthlessness makes them top candidates for corporate CEOs and captains of industry. In other words, most of them are more like Mickey than Mason – unscrupulous businessmen who will do or say anything, or exploit anyone, to get ahead.
Mickey is an insurance agent in Wisconsin who hovers around potential clients like a vulture around fresh-smelling carcasses. No matter what he overhears, he has a convincing cautionary tale to contribute to the conversation – a horror story that could have been prevented by the purchase of liability insurance.
He’s surrounded by generally good people, but to Mickey, they’re all naïve marks to be used for his benefit. There’s Bob Egan (David Harbour), an affable insurance salesman with the Achilles’ heel of empathy for his clients; Gorvy Hauer (Alan Arkin), a dottering old man with an Eastern European accent who is baited into buying insurance for his ramshackle abode; and Jo Ann Prohaska (Lea Thompson), his quasi-separated spouse, who functions primarily as a bank whenever Mickey needs an influx of cash.
Mickey is a very Kinnear-y character, if you know what I mean. I can’t imagine anybody else in the role; Kinnear is to hollow, opportunistic corporate suits as James Spader is to secretly kinky sex addicts, and his performance here is seemingly effortless.
It would all be too easy to reform Mickey over the course of the film, but Jill Sprecher, the co-writer and director (her last film was 13 Conversations About One Thing, released a decade ago), doesn’t sink into the abyss of morality, remaining cynical to the end about her character’s condition.
What begins as an elementary character study in psychopathy spins on its heels with the revelation that Gorvy possess an extremely rare and valuable violin, which Mickey plans to steal. This leads to a falling-domino plot of tragic developments that recalls such modern bungled-crime classics as Fargo and A Simple Plan, played out on a teeth-chattering frozen climate that acts as a character in itself.
Thin Ice may be the most successful black comedy in years, an always-engaging parable about the perils of avarice that also showcases Billy Crudup as a loose-cannon alarm-system installer and Bob Balaban as a fusty violin dealer. But if Sprecher’s story is a house of cards, it suffers from a faulty foundation that only reveals itself in the film’s final moments, the kind of climax that prompts you to rethink everything you just saw.
Information is delivered with such swiftness that it’s enough for us to frantically absorb it, let alone process it with everything we’ve already seen. Problem is, once you do process it, Thin Ice becomes an impossibly elaborate M.C. Escher drawing that relies on a preposterous number of coincidences and implausibilities to get off the ground.
Conclusion notwithstanding, this bleak recession-era comedy is worth seeing, if nothing else than for its mature look at a genuine sociopath next door.
THIN ICE. Director: Jill Sprecher; Cast: Greg Kinnear, Billy Crudup, Alan Arkin, David Harbour, Lea Thompson, Bob Balaban, Peter Thoemke; Distributor: Art Takes Over; Release date: Friday at Regal Shadowood 16, Regal Delray 18, Living Room Theaters at FAU, Cobb Jupiter 18, Frank Theaters at Sunrise Eleven and Frank Theaters Intracoastal 8.