Finely Crafted 'Ice Storm' Captures '70s in Unrelenting Deep Freeze

At the very beginning of The Ice Storm, Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire), a 16-year-old who attends boarding school in New York and reads Dostoevsky and the Fantastic Four, announces that families are like voids from which you can leave but must always return. At that moment, he's on his way back into the void, heading to his Connecticut home to spend Thanksgiving, 1973, with his family.

The events of the few days that follow are devastatingly realistic. The talented Ang Lee (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility) has directed this story of uneasy family relationships in the restless, promiscuous culture of the early 1970s with crystalline precision, leaving the audience to stare at the ugly and universal truths underneath. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is having a decidedly unromantic affair with his next-door neighbor Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), while his wife Elena (Joan Allen) is showing signs of being unable to put up with the charade of their 17-year marriage any longer. Their children, meanwhile, are beginning to discover sex and the perverse drama of human relationships in their own half-innocent, half-devious ways.

The ice storm, which literally freezes the world around the Hoods and the Carvers, serves as a kind of natural catalyst which brings all of their disappointments and repressed feelings to the surface, or at least forces them to break through their stiff behavioral code and emote. The Ice Storm, based on Rick Moody's 1994 novel, is a complex and, almost inevitably, flawed work of art, but one can't help being affected by nearly everything that transpires.

Lee's sensitive direction allows the film both to indict and to forgive these characters at the same time. The presence of sin is unmistakable--even the name of the town, New Canaan, has Biblical implications--but no one really bears the blame. Many of the characters' actions seem harmless enough until they're in too deep to turn around. Ben and Janey's affair is so casual and matter-of-fact that it's easy to forget the pain they are causing others, and even themselves.

The Hoods' Thanksgiving dinner is particularly telling: the awkwardness of trying to fit into a traditional familial mold is immediately apparent, but the source of that awkwardness is much harder to locate. In a dining room designed in functional '70s style--sleek metal chairs scrape against a stone floor, and large windows display the gloomy weather outside--Ben Hood asks his 14-year-old daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) to say grace. Wendy can't take him seriously, so instead she delivers a monologue thanking God for the food they are about to gorge themselves upon, and then begins rambling about war and politics. Something is forcing this family seriously out of joint, but no one has any idea how to remedy the situation.

Several elements of the story suggest that the cause of their pain might be the social climate of the decade. Lee's portrayal of the 1970s is scarily realistic. He doesn't overplay period detail: the furniture is slightly tacky, the shirt lapels are wider, and Kevin Kline's sideburns come halfway down to his chin, but none of this changes the ageless, affluent suburban setting. The film lets the audience laugh at the decade, but there are disturbing undertones to even the funniest scenes.

When the Hoods attend a "Key Party," where husbands place their car keys in a bowl and wives fish them out to form new sexual partnerships, the hostess presents them with the bowl and says, with a devilish smile, "new this year!" It's too new for the Hoods, who don't quite know how to handle free love. Meanwhile, precocious Wendy Hood insists on wearing a Richard Nixon mask during foreplay with Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood). These details, however uncomfortably amusing, put the very local action of the film into a larger context. If the film's goal is to get at the depressing root behind all the ridiculous muck that clutters up their lives, then it is an unqualified success.

But for a film that is willing to tackle so many complex issues, one wishes it were willing to offer some kind of moral resolution for its characters. By the end, a child has died and one of the main characters is finally, in this world of restrained emotions, reduced to tears. For a while it seems as if the ice storm--which the camera dwells upon in the second half of the film--will transform the lives of the Hood family. Instead, it leaves them at the very bottom of the familial void to which they must belong.

The actors all give exquisitely controlled performances, but the film's depressing story arc leaves their performances stunted. As Ben and Elena Hood, Kline and Allen are especially adept at communicating their pain to the audience, even though they can't even communicate with each other. But Kline's character in particular comes across as clownish, because he's never given a chance to emerge from his foolish, self-indulgence. Ricci's stone-faced Wendy Hood is interesting to watch but difficult to penetrate. Sigourney Weaver's sultry next-door neighbor remains a mystery throughout the film. Lee suggests that every character is going through some sort of emotional turmoil, no matter how hard they may be trying not to let it show. However, the audience needs more access into the minds of these characters to make the bleak ending more meaningful.

The Ice Storm is still a significant achievement: movies rarely create a world this lifelike and treat the past with such devastating honesty. Lee deconstructs family relationships and social unease with as much ardor as he amplified the joyous heart of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. One wishes, though, for some greater redemption to fully flesh out the lives of its characters. The ice storm in this film, as a natural symbol of change and the wiping away of sins, is like Noah's flood without the rainbow.