The Ice Storm Review
by Cavan van Ulft (vanulft AT comnet DOT ca)June 3rd, 1998
Ice Storm, The (1997)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?Ice+Storm,+The+(1997)
Rating: 9 out of 10 (alternate scale: ****1/2)
_The Ice Storm_ is perhaps the first movie ever to have taken a long, probing look at the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s, and then decided to unwaveringly condemn it for what it was: an infantile exercise in sexual adventure that ultimately destroyed families. It might strike some as ironic (or distasteful) that it took a foreign director, the masterful Ang Lee, to expose America’s Nixon-era social shortcomings, but he does it with the evenhanded objectivity that only a spectator of the game could hope to enjoy, creating in the process a truly remarkable piece of filmmaking.
In the opening scene, as the sun comes up over an ice-beaten Connecticut railway line, we are led to believe that this will be a story about the blows that family members deal one another without even knowing, or meaning it. Instead, the focus here is on pain: profound, all-encompassing pain. In this bleak Connecticut autumn, everyone is a victim, and the victimisation is as deliberate and inescapable as it is pervasive. There are no pointed fingers, no convenient scapegoats. There is no one without sin here, and no one whose sins go unpunished. Far from engaging in the naive outrage of the day at a corrupt system spinning out of control, the film takes a detached historical perspective of events, resigned to a tacit approval of those horrors of modern society which constitute its characters’ greatest fears. This film reminds all of us that we have stopped wincing at our convictionless environment. It has become normal.
The inept, halfhearted extramarital misadventures of the affluent Silent Generation parents of New Canaan, Connecticut eerily mirror the hesitant sexual explorations of their children. These wizened, politically conscious children look on in disbelief as their ignorant and self-absorbed parents spiral into oblivion. The traditional familial roles of parent and child have been reversed; not in order to conform to some clever poetic device, but because that is what actually went on in the American households of the early seventies. The inference is clear: something is rotten in the state Connecticut.
The entire cast functions perfectly together, a large and incomprehensibly complex machine that brings to fruition the film’s desolate theme. Kevin Kline drives his character, the disconsolate adulterer Benjamin Hood, with boundless, naked talent. He stares, dead-eyed, out the window of his concrete tower high above New York; he carries his daughter in his arms through the forest, determined, intense; drunk, at a party, he sits, sullen and withdrawn, but never, ever idle. Benjamin Hood is a selfish man, but he takes no pleasure from life; indeed, nor do any of the characters: they all smile, at one point or another, but these are but temporary glimpses of what a happy life could be like, and in the face of all that is going wrong, these moments do not last long. The chill, wet air, “the molecules,” as Mikey Carver (played with touching innocence by Elijah Wood) says, seem to cast a palpable pall over everyone and everything in New Canaan. Joan Allen’s finely-wrought, intelligent portrayal of Benjamin’s wife, Elena, fuming impotently at the wrongs done her, provides the perfect compliment to Kline’s character. Christina Ricci turns in what is certainly the most flawless and fully-realised performance of her young career, as the Hoods’ inquisitive and opinionated daughter, Wendy. This girl is a complete, believable person whose anguish spills out onto the screen in great torrents.
_The Ice Storm_ is a film that had to be made. It provides no easy answers to its characters’ problems; it solves nothing. But perhaps it stands as a warning against allowing the social and psychological mismanagement of an entire generation of North American children to ever again occur.
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