The ice storm (spine 426)

The Ice Storm
Directed by: Ang Lee
1997
Spine #426

Thanksgiving hasn’t exactly proven the most fertile of holidays cinematically - in part because it’s difficult to utilize it for much more than gravy-doused familial dysfunction. Most would likely opt for the easy comfort and laughs of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but for those who prefer their turkey meat a shade darker, The Ice Storm - Ang Lee’s trenchant ode to Nixon-era suburban alienation - might prove the shrewder choice.

Based on Rick Moody’s novel, the story takes place in the New England suburb of New Canaan, Connecticut circa 1973 - amidst the backdrop of the Watergate scandal - and examines the decade’s shifting cultural currents through the pointed lens of the Hood family. Given that the movie’s introductory image is an ice-coated train slowly coming back to life, its wheels cracking free of their glacial armor, it’s hardly a stretch to suggest its characters are trapped in their own fog of middle-class malaise when we first meet them. Ben (Kevin Kline) is dissatisfied with his job and engaged in an emotionally vacant affair with his neighbor Janey (Sigourney Weaver), while his wife Elena (Joan Allen) dabbles in casual kleptomania, among other things. Their teenage children Paul (Tobey Maguire) and Wendy (Christina Ricci) are faced with the usual coming-of-age dilemmas and drama (with their matching cherubic, Hallmark card ready features, Maguire and Ricci really do look like they could be siblings - and the fact the movie doesn’t take better advantage of their chemistry together is a disappointment).

The film takes place over Thanksgiving (“It’s great that we can all be together. No yelling, no hysteria - especially with your grandpa not here, although we miss him”), but most of the drama comes to a head the following day, as the titular ice storm descends on the town like the visual metaphor to end all visual metaphors (anticipate various characters skidding and sliding on slippery surfaces that symbolize the lack of control over their own lives). Most notably, Ben and Elena’s marital discord comes bubbling rancorously to the surface (“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Paul asks, when Wendy notes that they recently stopped going to couples counseling) just as they arrive at what turns out to be a key party - that most cringe-inducing of attempts to combat the emotional ennui of suburban existence with a hearty dose of free-wheeling sexual liberation left over from the 60s (the women basically fish a set of car keys out of a bowl to determine who they’re going home with - what a time to be alive).

Initially, back in 1997, it felt as if the film’s dark humor could be more heightened… but it seems to sharpen with each subsequent viewing. It’s hard not to crack up over exchanges like these, between Janey’s spaced-out teenage son Mikey (Elijah Wood) and his semi-bewildered dad Jim (Jamey Sheridan) --

Jim: Hey guys. I’m back.
Mikey: You were gone?
Jim: Yeah, Mikey. I was in Houston, working on some great new ideas about silicon. Comes from sand. It’s a semiconductor. So how’s school?
Mikey: I… I don’t know.

Or there’s the scene in which Ben heads next door for a mid-afternoon rendezvous, only for Janey to randomly drive off - without explanation - to run errands… leaving him to wander her boxy white modernist monstrosity of a home in his boxers and lie on his backside on the undulating waterbed (how’s *that* for an upper middle-class 70s status symbol?). If you’re looking for someone to mask his own spiritual turmoil with an armor of white-collar geniality, you could scarcely ask for a better actor than Kevin Kline - it’s one of the best performances of his career (as an added bonus, he can actually appear in an ascot without being laughed off screen). Weaver was pushed relatively hard for an Oscar, and Allen was coming off back-to-back nominations of her own… but the real standout otherwise is Ricci, who perfectly captures that awkward transition between adolescence and womanhood - a character both too precocious and too naive for her own good.

Ang Lee, not surprisingly, proves a sure hand at navigating the film’s delicate mood shifts, which often feel as fragile as New Canaan’s ice-tipped tree branches… there’s a distinct yet elusive melancholy to the picture, one that drifts subtly through scenes like the draft from an open window. Some have gone so far as to declare The Ice Storm the best American film of the 90s, which is frankly more than a little ludicrous (consider the implications of that statement very, very carefully for a moment). Paul’s main subplot - in which he returns to Manhattan to meet up with a posh boarding school classmate (played by a fresh-faced Katie Holmes) - always feels like a bit of a nothingburger. Then there’s the fact that this isn’t exactly unexplored thematic territory… at least if you’ve watched actual films from the 70s or, I dunno - picked up any book by John Updike? But the film is definitely onto something with its view of the complicated bonding atoms that constitute a family dynamic, which Paul explains through the prism of his latest Fantastic Four comic book - “And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal anti-matter. Your family is the void you emerge from, and the place you return to when you die. And that's the paradox - the closer you're drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go.”

A return to the void… isn’t that what the holidays are all about? On second thought, maybe Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the more prudent choice.