Ice Princess Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)March 23rd, 2005
ICE PRINCESS
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Walt Disney Pictures
Grade: B
Directed by: Tim Fywell
Written by: Hadley Davis, story by Meg Cabot, Hadley Davis Cast: Michelle Trachtenberg, Kim Cattrall, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere, Trevor Blumas, Connie Ray, Kirsten Olson, Jocelyn Lai, Paul Sun-Hyng Lee, Michelle Kwan
Screened at: Loews E-Walk, NYC, 3/19/05
Harvard University's head honcho, Lawrence Summers, created a firestorm recently when he announced that women for the most part are not interested in the sciences. As you watch Brit director Tim Fywell unfold Hadley Davis and Meg Cabot's story, "Ice Princess," you at first see the error of Mr. Summers' ways. By the conclusion, however, you find an argument in his favor. How so? Just look at the story...
Casey Carlyle (Michelle Trachtenberg) anchors the production about a young, gifted woman of seventeen who is both athletic and intellectual. She has a conflict. Her mother, Mrs. Caryle (Joan Cusack), teaches in a local Connecticut college and is quite aware that her daughter is a physics geek with straight A's in a subject in which everyone I know was lucky to get C's. She has a chance to use her brain to get a full scholarship to Harvard, but her mother's dream is not Casey's. The personable, otherwise malleable Casey, is as excellent a figure skater as she is a budding physicist and wants to postpone her physics ambitions to train for the Olympics to be held in 2006. This conflict provides most of the tension in this G-rated movie, which has a targeted audience of girls between the ages of, say, ten to eighteen.
Despite the presumed audience for "Ice Princess," Fywell's feature, however formulaic, can find a paying crowd of people of any age and both genders, largely because the acting is so good and even more, because the characters are painted in shades of gray rather than black or white. No one in the story is all bad, and though there are no villains, each character is flawed.
Casey's problem is that she expends too much effort dealing with her conflict. Though she's about to graduate from high school, she's still a mama's girl, always on the verge of giving up her dream simply because her mother insists that there's but an eight-year shelf life for figure skaters. Mrs. Carlyle's weakness is that while she recognizes and applauds her daughter's accomplishments in science, she is so deaf to Casey's own wishes that she does not attend the young woman's training sessions and seems intent on ignoring Casey's performance in an all-important competition. Tina Harwood (Kim Cattrall), who is Casey's coach and a good one at that who insists that her students fall in line at the rink at 5:30 each morning, is at an opposite pole from Mrs. Carlyle. She pushes her own daughter, Gen (Hayden Panettiere), to practice compulsively on the rink, deaf to hints that the girl wants to be just a regular teen eager to chuck skating altogether. For her part Gen is at first hostile to Casey as both are training for the same sport but over the course of the story learns to appreciate her rival's talents and to become her best friend.
Most of us in the audience are presumably out of touch with the competitive world of ice skating, thinking that the ice is meant only for the use of sportsmen especially from Canada who enjoy pushing a puck along the field and getting into fights with their rivals. We not only become attuned to this world but see quite a few examples of the sport in action, as competitive skaters like Korean-American Tiffany (Jocelyn Lai), whose father (Paul Sun- Hyung Lee) works two jobs to further his girl's ambitions, do triples, deep bends, whirls and whatever else impresses the bench full of judges who score every second of each skater as though the sport were a matter of life and death.
For the target audience still in secondary school, "Ice Princess" subliminally conveys the lesson that you're not either a brainiac or a jock. It's not just that Casey is an A student in physics: it's that she has actually set up a computer program, filming her colleagues and scanning the motion pictures into her computer to analyze the best ways to perform. For example using formulas that appear on the screen to be more complicated than E=MC squared, she calculates just how much extra velocity can arise when a skater crosses her arms in front of her. Unfortunately for her social life, she has a tendency to spout physical laws to a boy at a party who is interested in her, sending him on his way. It's also surprising that this woman appears to indulge in her first kiss at the age of seventeen, but if that's what it takes to get a G rating, so be it.
Rated G. 98 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
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Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
