Andrew Worsdale Domestic war film of the week
In 1973 director Ang Lee (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman and Sense and Sensibility) hadn’t set foot in the United States and couldn’t speak English. So it’s deeply paradoxical that he has directed a perceptive, poignant and sharp movie about the US during the era that was to see the end of Nixon, New Age philosophy, wife- swapping and the erosion of family values.
Based on Ricky Moody’s scathingly satirical 1994 novel, The Ice Storm is set on Thanksgiving weekend and portrays two suburban New England families who, despite their smiling exteriors, are both emotionally cold and falling to pieces.
The story revolves around Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) and his wife Elena (Joan Allen), and their two teenage kids. He’s having an affair with the neighbour (played by Sigourney Weaver) while the kids’ hormones are raging too — his daughter is out to seduce the neighbour’s two sons while her younger brother lusts after a young co-ed.
This is a coming-of-age story that involves families, which suggests that age doesn’t equal understanding. Everyone’s groping for answers agaunst the background of a country itself grappling for the notion of truth. As Lee says: “The structure of society is breaking down more in this film than in my earlier ones. The situation is more chaotic. The whole nation is in an adolescent period, experimenting with new things, new rules — even the adults are behaving like adolescents.”
The title of the film refers to a massive late-November snowstorm that becomes crucial to the film’s tragic yet compassionate resolution. But Lee doesn’t thump one over the head with didactic narrative motives. Rather, this is a slow- boiling character study of the dynamics of slightly dysfunctional families in a world about to change forever. All the characters are manifestly interesting to watch and Kline delivers one of the finest performances of his career as the loutish, smug, self-interested hubby. (He seems to be enjoying a comeback, after lying fallow for a couple of years.) Weaver also reveals hitherto-unseen complexity as the cheating wife, and young Christina Ricci (as the horny daughter) delivers a nuanced performance that is knowing, intense and perfectly subtle.
Lee captures the period detail immaculately with bell-bottoms, broad-collared shirts, petrol-obese chevvies along with arcane TV commercials and waterbeds. The antecedents for the picture are from 1950s potboilers like Douglas Sirk’s All that heaven Allows, in which Gregory Peck and Rock Hudson portrayed the troubled male conscience while American idealism was faltering all around them.
No one in this film is perfect but it’s great to spend time with them. Lee never melodramatises the material, he merely lets it go to its logical conclusion. He’s helped along the way by the meticulously cool yet ardent cinematography from Frederick Elmes, who has thrown his Blue Velvet trickery away.
The Ice Storm is a finely detailed portrait of husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children, teenagers and their desired sex partners, and illicit neighbourly relationships. The material here is fantastic and Lee rises to the occasion, delivering a film that looks at eroding family values and developing times with a scintillating mixture of cool sardonicism and heartfelt sympathy — it’s like The Brady Bunch with understated laughter and loads of empathy.