Iceman

One of the joys of revisiting my favorite year of cinema, 1984, is finally getting around to films that have been on my radar since I was a kid but that I never rented back in the VHS days and never get revived in rep cinemas so they feel like they don't exist anymore. I remember seeing the trailer for Iceman quite a bit as a kid and confusing it with The Thing, which I still had not seen in 1984. But this isn't a story about a group of Antarctic researchers who discover a hostile alien buried in the snow and ice; this is about a group of Arctic researchers discovering a prehistoric man buried in the snow and ice and what happens after these scientists are able to bring him back to life.

Norman Jewison developed this project for many years, but it finally came to the screen under the direction of Australian filmmaker Fred Schepisi, whose eclectic career has ranged from Steve Martin's Roxanne (1987) to the film of Six Degrees of Separation (1993) to the Richard Russo/Paul Newman TV miniseries Empire Falls (2005). Iceman stars Timothy Hutton, who was the It-guy for a good stretch there back in the early to mid-'80s, and Lindsay Crouse, whose formal, mannered performance style is perfectly suited to the scientist she plays here. The fine cast also includes Josef Sommer, David Strathairn, Danny Glover, and the ubiquitous '80s character actor James Tolkan.

But the best thing about Iceman is the performance by John Lone, who stars as the titular unfrozen Neanderthal Man who the scientist called Charlie. Lone's reactions and behavior as a primitive human with intelligence and simplistic language are both intriguing and moving. His realization that he's trapped somewhere unfamiliar and the ways he attempts to communicate with people he assumes are his captors but might possibly be similar to him is compelling.

The rest of the film is a little dry, with the scientists engaging in philosophical and moral debates about whether Charlie should be treated as a discovery and a specimen or as a human being. Most of these folks see their discovery as a first step in developing the technology for cryogenically freezing people, which could lead to a Nobel prize or a lot of money, but the anthropologist played by Hutton wants to study the primitive man and learn from him. Director Schepisi and cinematographer Ian Baker always keep their widescreen frames interesting, and while the pace may seem a bit slow by the standards of today, the picture feels just about right in terms of the way its minimal but compelling story develops.

I always laugh when people say things like, "You couldn't make that movie today," referring to subject matter that might be an affront to modern sensibilities because, in truth, Hollywood can't make most of the types of films it made with regularity forty years ago, even if there is nothing remotely offensive about them. No studio could or would be able to make a movie like Iceman today simply because not enough happens. This compelling little film would be deemed way too boring. I can't help but think what would have to be done to tell this story in order to make a contemporary version, either as a feature film or a miniseries. There would have to be so many more characters and so many more subplots; the Neanderthal man would learn to speak English; there would be multiple threats from the outside world to amp up the steaks; and the ending would have to be far more dramatic and spectacular. But the story we get in Iceman is a perfectly solid and intriguing work of speculative fiction. The ending does feature a very cool and surprising special effect, but the rest is conveyed though basic editing. There is a sincerity of approach to this picture that I enjoyed, a kind of ordinariness applied to an extraordinary story that I miss in contemporary genre filmmaking.