This week Ariel Vroman’s film on the life of Richard Kuklinski, infamously dubbed The Iceman while at large, enters the home entertainment arena and as well as featuring another superlative performance from Michael Shannon it is one of the finest depictions of the erosive nature of leading a double life.
Kuklinski was a committed family man and kept his wife and daughters in a very comfortable existence, what he managed to hide from them for nearly two decades is that his well paying job was less ‘currency exchange’ and more ‘mortality exchange’. Working for a number of very dangerous men and committing heinous acts of murder all to support his family a strange duality emerges, a duality which is ultimately unsustainable.
Vroman expertly weaves the two disparate characters through circumstances which blunt each distinct side of his personality. The family man who coos over his newborn daughter years later puts the same daughter (and his terrified family) through an ill-advised car chase when a random stranger insults his wife. The mask does not so much slip as fuse together with the face and only at the end of the film do we see the real Richard Kuklinski in a typically powerful scene with Shannon once again confirming his position as one of the finest actors working today.
Another film, also a period piece, which came to mind was Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake. Both films centre around a family and that family’s survival in hard times. The two titular characters share a determination to keep their work secret from their families and both, depending on your point of view, deal with murder. Both Leigh and Vroman keep the family closed away, setting most of their scenes in the family home, and letting the audience follow their lead characters away to their hidden lives.
Shannon’s ability to show these two faces is crucial to Vroman’s film. In growing desperation and in dangerous company The Iceman appears but at no time do the two seem anything other than born of the same soul. Imelda Staunton’s Vera Drake is similarly affecting in Leigh’s film, the same can’t be said of Harry Tasker in True Lies but then the adherence to the action movie genre would not have benefited from such a divisive performance from Arnie.
The double life is a staple of cinema, almost as much as boy meets girl or tussling with aliens landing in New York. It is a constant of the various superhero universes which are never far from the multiplexes. The two faces of our superheroes share much of what succeeds with The Iceman (even the name has a foot in both the real and the comic book world). The double lives of Peter Parker and Spider-Man, Clark Kent and Superman are used in a number of ways to engage us. There is the threat of discovery of the true identity, they exist to propel two narratives at once and also to contrast the powerful and weak natures of the same man. Kuklinski’s position and double life is just as precarious, just as divided and just as strong and as weak as the two other examples.
There are countless other examples when you open the field up to the supernatural. Eli from Let the Right One In, Regan’s demonic double in The Exorcist and numerous of David Lynch’s characters from Twin Peaks and beyond. It is a boundless and exciting horizon of opportunity against which to set your story. Michael Shannon and Ariel Vroman’s work in The Iceman is one of the finest examples of the form and it’s well worth watching to see Shannon’s two faces merge into one.
The Iceman is out on Blu-ray and DVD now courtesy of Lions Gate Home Entertainment.
