AT THE MOVIES

With

                                               David Begelman

“The Iceman:” The Fragmented World of the Hitman

 

Ariel Vromen’s 2013 film “The Iceman” is a cinematic version of the life of a real-life contract killer, Richard Kuklinski. One of its appeals is the treatment of the disparity between his internal mind-sets. We can’t quite match his murderous ways with other of his family commitments. In his case, it’s the attachment to his wife, the former Deborah Pellicotti (Winona Ryder) and his two daughters.

The difference between the film and reality is that the real Kuklinski was a serial killer recruited by the Mafia after the fact. The movie Kuklinski (portrayed in a tight-lipped and grim way by Michael Shannon) is primarily a contract killer most of the time. His murders are commissioned by his Mafia boss, Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta). I say “most” of his murders, only because there are two scenes in the film in which Kuklinski, independently of mob orders, cuts the throat of a person who insults him and tears after another motorist who taunts him. He has murder in his heart for the other driver, and at considerable risk to his wife and two daughters who are passengers in his recklessly speeding car.

The cinematic departure from real life boils down to fashioning a makeover Kuklinski, one who can occasionally murder in a fit of rage, but principally kill on orders from the mob. He’s not one who roams the streets looking for victims he could summarily dispatch for the sheer thrill of it. But the real Kuklinski was just such a person.

             There’s an important difference between serial and contract killers. And as nasty as the latter are, we somehow feel we can comprehend careers based purely on mob affiliation or financial transactions.

            What is more difficult to understand is how both types of character can manage to separate their grisly handiwork from other aspects of their personalities. In the film, Kuklinski may be at the beck and call of a boss who orders him to dispatch this or that thug, but he is a devoted father and husband at home.

Not that Kuklinski is the exception that proves the rule. Mafia overlords, we are told, have steadfast commitments to “family values,” despite their resorting to lethal ways of ridding the world of enemies and informers. What is more, history is studded with murderers also dedicated to values as homespun as apple pie.

Gilles de Rais was a devoted military captain in the army led by St. Joan of Arc. Yet he was a serial killer of untold numbers of young children. Dennis Rader, the notorious BTK killer of Wichita, Kansas, was the responsible husband and father of two, not to mention Cub Scout leader and president of the Congregational Council of Christ Lutheran Church. John Wayne Gacy, who murdered 33 young men and boys, was the Vice-President of the Jaycees, active in Democratic politics, and was awarded a commendation by Rosalyn Carter.

It’s high time we stopped extrapolating from the endearing quality to every other aspect of a personality or a career—as though straightforward connections among them were somehow enshrined in natural law.

Vromen’s “The Iceman” doesn’t really pack a wallop beyond dwelling on the apparent incongruity between the family-oriented and sociopathic aspects of Kuklinski. The flick gets caught up in the usual mobster-related scenarios in which characters, reminiscent of hoods we have been accustomed to see in movies like “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” do their thing. More often than not, it comes down to whacking someone who irks them—and in a linguistic idiom obscure to all but a select few.

In “The Iceman,” as in untold numbers of recent Hollywood films, hitmen and their victims are made to inhabit a helter-skelter world of such furious action, you find yourself pining for the good old days of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler or Nick and Nora Charles. There you can settle for murder, to be sure. But at least you’re not befuddled over what is actually happening at such a rapid-fire pace. Nor puzzled over this or that obscure mobster scenario that has you experiencing sudden attacks of incomprehension.