`The Ice Storm,” intelligent and sad, is a movie about people who live in glass houses and won’t throw stones. In its impeccable way, it’s also about sin, punishment and redemption in New Canaan, Conn., an expensive waspy New England suburb in the literary terrain of two famous writing Johns: Cheever and Updike. It is the time of the Watergate hearings and the high noon of the sexual revolution. Things are definitely not well in this land.
Based on a 1994 novel by Rick Moody, and directed by Ang Lee, the superb Taiwanese-American craftsman of “The Wedding Banquet” and “Sense and Sensibility,” this is a literary movie in a good sense. Winner of the best screenplay award (for writer-coproducer James Schamus) at the last Cannes Film Festival and the subject already of widespread critical praise, it’s well-proportioned and tightly structured. It’s a movie full of literate talk, fine actors and sensible social and psychological observations.
As we watch Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver or Joan Allen playing adult members of two neighboring families, the Hoods and the Carvers, we’re conscious of both social class and pervasive discontent, the fact that money and privilege — and New Canaan — bring these families so little emotional solace or protection. Superficially, nothing seems wrong with their lives. But, internally, everything is amiss.
Beneath this well-bred, vaguely sympathetic upper middle class film and community lies chaos: a sense that the world is badly out of joint and that only God, or perhaps a filmmaker, can set it right again.
In the movie, the Hoods and Carvers live close by each other in a landscape mantled with snow and veined with ice, with fires down below. Amiable Ben Hood (Kline) is having a dissatisfying affair with his neighbor’s wife, Jane Carver (Weaver). His teenage daughter Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) plays sexual games with both the Carver boys: older Mikey (Elijah Wood) and younger Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd).
Hood’s son, Paul (Tobey Maguire) is off to New York City on doomed erotic expeditions of his own. And the two deceived spouses — Ben’s Elena (Allen) and Jane’s Jim (Jamey Sheridan) seem concerned elsewhere. There’s a sense everywhere of discontent and unease assuaged only briefly by the glasses of ice-cubed liquor, cigarettes or illicit sex. Midway through the movie, there’s a key party among the New Canaanites: A party game in which keys are dropped in a bowl and the wives go home (and to bed) with whichever husband selects them. It is the second saddest scene in the film, exceeded only by the sacrificial climax.
Would anyone play this game in a community where they might face each other in a church or grocery store afterward? Weren’t spouse-swapping parties more anonymous? But Lee and Schamus make their point. The New Canaanites have lost faith, and don’t give a damn.
The movie is a tragi-comedy of manners which takes place on some very significant dates: Nov. 22 and 23, 1973, on the 10th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and in the midst of the Watergate hearings. On TV, Richard Nixon is being eviscerated; Kennedy, his 1960 vanquisher, is long dead. Nixon has betrayed them, but perhaps Kennedy has too. Ice and snow seem ready to swallow them up.
America itself seems as fouled up as the Hoods and Carvers.
We’re made conscious of these social ironies. And the actors guide us through the psychological ones. The children are good, especially the snappish Ricci, but the adults — Kline with his fuzzy affability, Weaver with her fury, Allen and Sheridan with their blissful ignorance — are the best of company, college trained and theater bred, adept with classic references and nuances of all kinds. Kevin Kline is a masterly comedian, a specialist in confusion, and Weaver and Allen bring realistic detail and high theatricality to their roles.
It’s a main point of “The Ice Storm” that the children are mimicking the sexual looseness and confusion of their elders. This is a toney movie, but its subject, amusingly, is the moral superficiality of this group, with its adulteries and swap clubs. God has failed them — or they have failed God — and midway through their troubles comes the ice storm, a kind of divine retribution.
Ang Lee has specialized up to now in family dramas. But though he’s become expert at drawing the interconnections between families, here, he’s dealing with two families unsure of themselves. And he’s recreated their seemingly amoral backdrop, the ’70s, with amazing detail: from garish clothes and decor to angry songs and TV shows flickering on distant sets.
Lee loved or was amused by the complex Chinese and British families of his other films, including “Eat Drink Man Woman’ and “Sense and Sensibility.” And he loves these people too — or at least, pities them. The novel “The Ice Storm” is infused with a sense of the religious, of the solace all these people lack. The movie isn’t. But it’s still bright and admirable, if somewhat cold, even when it tries to move us most deeply. When the ice shatters after the storm, it’s only a symbol. The broken glass of “Ice Storm” tends to leave our own reflections — and those of our equally troubled times — basically undisturbed.
”THE ICE STORM”
(star) (star) (star) 1/2
Directed by Ang Lee; written by James Schamus, based on the novel by Rick Moody; photographed by Frederick Elmes; edited by Tim Squyres; production designed by Mark Friedberg; music by Mychael Danna; produced by Ted Hope, Schamus, Lee. A Fox Searchlight release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:52. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity.
THE CAST
Ben Hood ……………. Kevin Kline
Jane Carver …………. Sigourney Weaver
Elena Hood ………….. Joan Allen
Jim Carver ………….. Jamey Sheridan
Wendy Hood ………….. Christina Ricci
Mikey Carver ………… Elijah Wood
