The Ice Storm

Bluesky

The Ice Storm is Ang Lee's 1997 adaptation of Rick Moody's novel. It is set in an affluent suburb in Connecticut during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1973. The drama centres around the interplay between two nuclear families, the Hoods and the Carvers. All is not well. Both marriages are on the rocks having run out of steam.

The film opens with Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire) travelling home from boarding school in New York. As the train, stalled in the ice storm of the film's title, restarts and travels through the bejewelled landscape, he muses on the Fantastic Four and that comic's relation to family dysfunction. The film takes its time focusing on the glistening beads and icicles and the crackling train wheels on frozen rails. Paul's family is waiting for him as he alights at New Canaan station. This scene bookends the film.

Skipping back a few days to the events that lead to this point, the film becomes embroiled in the interwoven plots that all come to a head during the ice storm. When it comes to the children, Paul and Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci), Mikey (Elijah Wood) and Sandy Carver (Adam Hann-Byrd), they are about sexual discovery and rebellion. The actions of adults in the film don't mirror the growing pains of the children, they overshoot them. Wendy's mother Elena's (Joan Allen) shoplifting outclasses her daughter's in terms of both quantity and ineptitude. Her father Ben's (Kevin Kline) affair with Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver) is more emotionally clumsy than the adolescent fumbling. At the confluence, a key party on the night of the storm, the parents take the drinking and casualness of sex to a level that their children just don't.

The collision between 1960s ideals of free love and the American family unit plays out against the backdrop of Watergate and the breakdown of the Nixon government. With The Ice Storm, Ang Lee is not cruel or judgemental. The adults in the film are lonely and unfulfilled, sexually and socially. Fulfilling the American dream has failed to satisfy them. Having all the accoutrements of wealth doesn't fill every hole. There is a gentle sadness to this film. Lee also puts in a lot of humour, not overblown or slapstick. It's situational, in dialogue and the awkwardness of characters. There are also little references to other films, Wendy saying grace is a knowing nod to Wednesday, Christina Ricci's character in Addams Family Values.

James Schamus's script is sharp and witty. Lee is very good at getting affecting performances out of actors, especially the younger ones. But what really stands out about The Ice Storm, at least initially, is the way that he and the cinematographer Frederick Elmes use the frozen landscape. It is quite simply stunningly beautiful. Between reflection and refraction, the sparkle of ice wet with rain and the new sun just above the horizon, Lee gives us a complexity of light that is unmatched. He can also do something else: direct action. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon shows how capable he is at that type of filmmaking. It's there in the two shoplifting scenes, when the car skids out on ice and crashes, when inappropriate behaviour is discovered. He can convey emotion, character and narrative through movement.

Source