It’s every generation’s conceit that no other came before it — or after it.
We are hearing that echoed now in the reception being accorded the chilling new Ang Lee social-commentary movie “The Ice Storm” — which in one memorable scene has upscale housewife Sigourney Weaver bored to tears after a dreary session of adulterous suburban lovemaking. She listens as her neighbor-lover Kevin Kline prattles on about his corporate worries and golf game, until she can take it no more and cuts him off with a withering: “You’re boring me. I already have a husband. I’m not particularly interested in having a second one.”
“Ice Storm,” which also stars Joan Allen as Kline’s wife, Christina Ricci as their daughter and Jamey Sheridan as Weaver’s husband, is being billed and celebrated as a Seventies movie — as perhaps the ultimate Seventies movie. Set in 1973, it’s replete with all the angst, self-indulgence, excess, immorality and soullessness that, to contemporary minds, supposedly defined the era.
But what makes the film so horrifying is that, for a certain class and kind of American, the plague its characters suffer from is a permanent American condition. The characters in “Ice Storm” may wear bell-bottoms and sideburns, but it’s a movie for every time — including now.
I recently discussed the film with Sheridan, who plays Weaver’s cuckolded, and later reciprocally adulterous husband, a well-off inventor and engineer living the New Yorker magazine good life in Connecticut’s woodsy, upscale Fairfield County.
Remembered as a regular on television’s “Chicago Hope,” Sheridan is a very literate actor who starred on Broadway in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” with Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst. He was propelled into the theater studying creative writing and Shakespeare at the University of California.
Almost the very first word out of Sheridan’s mouth in discussing “Ice Storm” was not “Seventies” but “Cheever.”
“It read to me like Cheever,” said Sheridan, who grew up in Pasadena, Calif. “Some people have an agenda and see this as generational, but I lived through the Seventies and I didn’t experience this. It’s a matter of class, something terrible happening in the context of the American dream. It’s much more a John Cheever and John Updike world.”
What happens in “Ice Storm” happens to people who have realized their material dream — wonderful houses, marvelous clothes, expensive cars — and finding in that fulfillment, nothing.
“These people are losing any sense of value in their own minds for those things,” Sheridan said.
Having grown up just 10 miles from where “Ice Storm” is set, 20 years beforehand, I recognized the characters in “Ice Storm” instantly — the mindless parties, the ritual mate swapping, the heavy drinking, the country clubs, the material possessions that represented everything they lived for but amounted to nothing of any real consequence to their lives — people who indulged their children while neglecting and abandoning them, dooming their children to lives much like their own.
But that was in the 1950s! They might wear flared jeans and long collars in “Ice Storm” instead of Bermuda shorts and button-down collars, yet they’re the same troubled souls. Cheever wrote about them in “The Sorrows of Gin” and “The Swimmer.” Sloan Wilson wrote about them in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” In the 1940s, J.D. Salinger did with Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye.” And John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about them in “Manhattan Transfer” and “The Beautiful and the Damned” in the 1920s.
Sheridan’s character is a loser, even when he gets to turn the tables on Kline’s, and especially at the horrible climax. But, unlike the others, he has a chance to escape.
“He’s a dreamer who’s able to make a living,” said Sheridan. “But he’s not thinking about that. He’s thinking about the moon. That allows him to leap over what his wife is doing, what his kids are doing. He’s entertained by his Walter Mitty dreams. He fancies himself somebody who should have been working with NASA on the moon shot. He doesn’t have the huge bitterness.”
What is most telling, what’s of most moment to parents contemplating the color of Mercedes-Benz to add to their fleet today, what cuts most through the rubbish about bell-bottoms nostalgia, is director Ang Lee’s penchant for seeing and relating all this through the staring, knowing eyes of the couples’ children. Sheridan read the Rick Moody novel on which it is based.
“The book is like John Cheever’s raging hippie son who hates his father more than anything in the world,” Sheridan said. “It’s that (Cheever) world, that kind of language, but this (reads like) a son who wants to rip the faces off his parents, he hates them so bad.”
