The mythological elements of Harold Ramis's The Ice Harvest are less ancient than those in Christian tradition, and certainly less profound; but for moviegoers, they too may seem timeless. Here are the bag of cash, the slippery dame, the roadhouse, the gun, the white-collar stiff trying his best to go crooked. When I tell you that the action happens on December 24, and that one of the three leads is Bad Santa's Billy Bob Thornton, the formula becomes complete. The Ice Harvest is the latest anti-Christmas movie, played more as film noir this time than as comedy.

It's a pretty good noir, too. Written by two real pros, Richard Russo and Robert Benton, based on a novel by Scott Phillips, The Ice Harvest begins with the traditional voiceover spoken in retrospective mood by a first-time criminal. He is a weary John Cusack, cast here as a mob lawyer who has dared to steal $2 million from the biggest gangster in Wichita. Within twenty-four hours, Cusack will skip town with the man who has urged him on, a local porn merchant (Thornton) who clearly is the steadier partner. First, though, Cusack must make it through Christmas Eve, a night he celebrates by driving through the pissing cold rain to his favorite strip club, there to ogle Wichita's mistress of pole dancers, Connie Nielsen.

You will understand, automatically, that double-crosses will ensue, the bag of cash will go astray and the big gangster will threaten mayhem. As for the dame: Once you have noted the men's abject fascination with the outer surfaces of women, you may be certain that Nielsen's looks will prove as deceptive as they are alluring.

All this is standard. What makes The Ice Harvest stand out is the crispness of the dialogue, the sureness of the pacing and the unexpected depth of feeling that comes through.

"Guys of our age," begins a sentence spoken at one point by Cusack to a very drunk buddy (Oliver Platt) who functions as his chubby and disheveled double. Platt is married to Cusack's former wife, lives in what had been Cusack's house, acts as a not very capable stepfather to Cusack's children and boisterously, sloppily, hilariously voices the desperation that Cusack would now be feeling, if he weren't hopping out of his skin with anxiety at having committed his crime. If Thornton is the tougher self that Cusack is trying to become, then Platt is the self he wants to escape--a desire that plays as both funny and poignant. By the calendar, Cusack is hardly ready to be one of the "guys of our age," but his face in The Ice Harvest is more wan and puffy than you've seen before. His management of a perpetually quarter-drunk state is convincingly practiced; his demeanor before his children, appropriately subdued; his stabs at flirtation with Nielsen, the stuff of middle-aged shame.

Although The Ice Harvest may put its noir thrills into your lap a little too cozily, with too knowing a wink, the underlying ugliness of the story sometimes comes through with surprising intensity. There's routine misogyny in the film but also blunt, shocking payback for it; generic cynicism about the corruption of a town but also precise observation of real, unencouraging American places.

And at the end, best of all, comes a happier version of redemption than you could have hoped for. I don't want to overpraise The Ice Harvest, a film whose merits include an unassuming demeanor; but the ending may be the best thing of its kind since Joe E. Brown's immortal "Nobody's perfect."

* * *

They do still make 'em like that, although maybe they shouldn't. The film version of Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha is now hitting the theaters, wrapped in prestige and promotions for the award-giving season. The production is deluxe; the lengthy running time calculated to impress Oscar voters; and the director, Rob Marshall, brings with him a past Academy Award nomination for Chicago. To the extent that "Hollywood" still means anything, this is it.

It means the story of Japanese women--their sufferings, their rivalries, their loves, their art--before and after World War II, as performed by Chinese actresses (Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh), shot on a set built in Thousand Oaks, California. The dialogue, written by Euro-Americans, is spoken in accented English, to remind us that the characters are foreign. Marshall's direction is a definite improvement over his work on Chicago--thank God.

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