The Ice Storm

Looking for answers in the frozen world of 1970s suburbia.

Directed by Ang Lee
A Fox Searchlight Release

There's a scene that comes about halfway through The Ice Storm that shows middle-class wifeandmother Elena Hood (Joan Allen) being busted for shoplifting lipstick from a local (New Canaan, CT) drugstore. The scene is brief. You don't actually see much of the action, and you hear nothing: the scene is shot from the other side of the glass door through which Elena tries to exit. She's stopped by the pharmacist, asked to empty her pockets. Her hands move briefly, flitting like hummingbirds, but almost instantly, she resigns herself to being caught, and offers no protest or explanation. Instead, she lowers her eyes, and her pale thin hair falls over her pale thin face.

This scene, like most others in Ang Lee's exploration of Connecticut burbs-life circa 1973, is meticulously observed and exquisitely arranged. The instant of Elena's apprehension follows another short scene, in which she's riding her bicycle into town, her hair blown back and her face close to smiling, tentative but also recalling, for a moment, what she might have been like when she was young and hopeful. Angry with her cheating husband Ben (Kevin Kline), distanced from her prep school student son Paul (Tobey Maguire, who also narrates with appropriate measures of intelligent hindsight and lingering self-delusion), and inspired by her bike-riding, shoplifting daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci), Elena has dragged her own dusty three-speed out of the garage, ridden it down to the drugstore, and picked up a couple of items. Of course she can't get away with it; she's not so skilled at stealing as Wendy, or as artful at dissembling as Ben. Instead, Elena is awkward and anxious, blaming herself, unable to muster up any righteous indignation or even a reasonably assured performance of same.

Most everyone gets caught doing something in this film. Written by James Schamus, based on Rick Moody's novel (who says he was moved to explore what happens to the kids who're left underdeveloped in John Updike novels), and shot by Frederick Elmes (David Lynch's favorite DP), it's a study of fuck-ups and betrayals, subtle and minor, familiar and excruciating. Set just before and on Thanksgiving (that most depressing and overwrought of Hallmark-driven holidays, perhaps especially in New England, where the whole hypocritical business originated), the film is cold. It's filled with images of visible breath puffs, frozen ground, and ice, delicately dark gray or crystal clear — mementos of existential paybacks and endless cycles of pain. The moral design is a familiar one in movies and novels, in which carelessness, malice and guilt always come with extravagant emotional price tags.

The ice is everywhere. At times, its metaphorical meaning is overstated—these characters are frozen in harsh, fragile existences, and don't you forget it. But it's also great-looking; it clicks in the wind on tree branches and those chimes favored by people with porches, breaks open in those metal ice trays, makes driving treacherous, and glitters in sunlight. Elena, like most everyone else in the film, might be understood to be living under ice, inside it, too close to its transparent surface. The characters are two families, the Hoods and the Carvers, neighbors who need, compete with, and resent each other. They're all afraid to be found out — as unhappy or under-resourced—to be forced to imagine alternatives. Their affluence is devastating.

The Carvers look as if they're even more on-the-edge than the Hoods. Janey (Sigourney Weaver) is having a passionless affair with Ben. Her husband Jim (Jamey Sheridan) is away on business most of the time (ironically, he's working on an as yet under-imagined Future, silicon and computer technologies), and tends to overlook domestic tensions. Their sons, Mikey (Elijah Wood) and Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), are plainly troubled: they play waiters at their parents' dinner parties, then gulp down unfinished cocktails in the kitchen.

Until her drugstore mishap, Elena is wholly unable to confront Ben on his adultery. She's internalized the rules of '70s suburban WASP conduct: you don't talk about anything (especially what's important), you self-medicate, you make appearances at parties, you wear fashionable outfits (the look is tacky to the max: wide lapels, halter tops and jumpsuits, long and clingy sweater vests, outsized jewelry: as Weaver describes their costumes, "Everyone sort of looks like a pimp"). Elena's trapped by her own moral severity and self-imposed isolation. (And you might say that Joan Allen is trapped in her brilliant perfection in playing this part: Elena is closely related to Allen's turn as Ur-ice-queen Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone's movie, as well as the frigid and self-blaming wives she played in The Crucible and Face/Off.)

The kids, coming of age with the sexual revolution and Watergate (and to a lesser extent, the civil rights movement) as a backdrop delivered via television, seem slightly better equipped than their parents to imagine some kind of resistance, however ineffectual or directionless. Sandy likes to blow up his G.I. Joes with firecrackers on the back porch; Paul is looking for romance with a Big City girl (someone from school who lives "in town," New York). And Wendy is experimenting with sex; her wannabe partners are both Sandy and Mikey (during a dry hump session with Mikey, she wears a rubber Nixon mask, making the episode unnerving and hilarious).

While the year 1973 is typically narrated as an historical break in national self-confidence, a moment of transition from willful innocence to exasperated cynicism, the story that emerges here is considerably less tidy. The children, whether whip-smart and articulate like Wendy or pained and vulnerable like Sandy, are emulating the incoherence they see in their parents. The adults are half-nostalgic for some sense of order that never existed, and half-intent on defining their own generational mores and expectations. They dabble in resistance and freedom (country clubbing, shopping, pot-smoking and wife-swapping), but can't quite get past the feeling that someone somewhere owes them something.

Ben might be looking for love, or maybe just a relief from boredom, but he's hardly intelligent about it. Instead he prattles on about himself, to the point that Janey abandons him midway through an afternoon tryst (she informs him that she's not looking for "another" husband). Where Elena is withdrawn and self-abnegating, Janey's problem seems initially to be the opposite: she's aggressively bitter, sharp-tongued and self-absorbed. Her selection at the key party that ends the film, where women pick car keys out of a bowl and go home with the man attached to them, is an acquaintance's 20-something son, a good-looking kid hungry to be Benjamin Braddock to her Mrs. Robinson.

Everyone is uptight, on the verge of breakdown, shrill and too aware of their various audiences. The film captures this sense of "verge-ness" perfectly. For all its aesthetic and thematic chilliness, it's about melting, too. And that's how you're left by the surprisingly dramatic but admirably underplayed finale, feeling just a bit melted.