The Ice Storm is that rare thing among the films disgorged each year from the United States: it is genuinely well-made. There are many things to like about it and some things which will leave the seasoned viewer in awe. Aong them are the razor-sharp photography aware of its own symbolism; the unpretty psycho-sexual verisimilitude; the beautifully detailed interiors of houses, conveying a strong nostalgia for a time - the seventies - when people did not so much lack a sense of style as 'suffer from style to a paralysing extent' (a useful judgement on the 70s I read recently in an art magazine).
The story concerns two neighbouring professional families in the north-east of the United States, the Hoods and the Carvers. The eldest son of one family, a beautiful and dreamy, uncertain boy of perhaps fourteen, is killed at the climax of the film and his death is clearly a punishment brought upon the adulterous and self-absorbed parents of the respective houses. The fact that this terrible event is the crux of the film suggests to me that Ang Lee is less interested in post-sixties infidelity as a theme (it's been done before, as Kevin Kline would remember well) than in the idea of the difficulty of socialising children in an amoral culture. This raises questions in turn about the possibility of 'growing up' at all in such a culture: bad behaviour spans the generations easily and makes them hard to tell apart. Parents in the film are adolescents encased in the ungainly shells of their own authority. They lumber about suffused with the bitterness of having missed the main chance romantically, which is the key to their adolescent optimism regarding the possibilities of delight contained in sex.
The adults' extramarital foolings-about are not half so poignant as their inability to give direction or, it seems, comfort to their children. The boys - and one girl, played by Nina Ricci with her white face, dark-circled eyes and scarlet, unsatisfied mouth - muddle through their desires in scenes that are gothic in their uncanniness. This disturbance comes about by setting human behaviours that are essential and pre-cultural in the glamorous, soothing domestic interiors of American modernity and the grey-white starkness of the Connecticut landscape in late autumn. Whenever the teenagers come together in this film, it is like discovering the thing that we know must be true but will not admit is true. Ang Lee seems to be pursuing something akin to the humourist P J O'Rourke's stipulation that for true horror we need a clash of homeliness and frank atavism: 'It has to be Mom eating snakes in the rec room.' The film stirs in its audience the anxiety that the pan of experience, exotic sets and decor notwithstanding, must be shallow indeed for these confrontations, upsets and refusals to feel so familiar, for their acid to cut so deeply. And yet the chief delight of the film is its delivery to us of privileged access to the players' mostly grim sexual adventures. No-one in the ensemble, least of all any of the youths, seems to mind being exposed utterly to us.
The plot evenly divides the time we spend with the parents and the time we spend with their offspring. We are invited both to laugh drily with the adults who like one another so little and to quiver with the adolescents who never seem far from biting one another with the urgency of erotic need. But the problem, of course, is that moving from one group to another is like trekking back and forth across the wintry wood that is shown several times to separate the neighbouring houses. The idea of a gulf between the generations is best shown when Wendy Hood, flustered by the entreaties of next-door neighbour Mikey Carver, collects herself afterward in a gesture of sexual bullying: she entices Mikey's younger brother, Sandy, who adores her, into a show-and-tell of genitalia. Sandy agrees, and they crowd together into the gleaming Carver bathroom. But face to face, it is too much for Sandy who, hyperventilating with anxiety, suddenly rejects the terms of the game with a cry of confused horror. We are shown with brutal economy that neither child is child enough to play such a game without cost. The moment is not comical; it is ugly in the feeling it generates of innocence having been trashed for no gain. The Ice Storm is serious about sex in a way American cinema almost never is, for its moralism never attempts to fool us with the absurdity of suggesting that we could succeed in avoiding 'bad' or 'coercive' sex: the suffering and anomie is built into the driving need. Banished in disgrace by Sigourney Weaver's halter-necked temptress after her misplaced power-play, Wendy stomps home. Kevin Kline, in the character of Ben Hood, the genially interested buffoon that he remains for much of the story, meets her on the stairs and asks her what she has done today. 'Nothing', she says, as any teenager might. It, like much of the film, is a beautifully managed exercise in suspending the audience between two utterly divergent points of view, showing the cold distances that lie underneath one roof.
The director Ang Lee, if not just the author of the novel that provided the film's narrative, has a keen sense of the rupture between mind and body that occurs at puberty. You could say that this rupture is the moment of being initiated into the ordeal of the civilised West. We have no external signs for it (or only inauthentic ones), and our parents seem unable to prepare us for it, but it is a transition one must make in order to be an adult in the West. Maturity in our culture is a willingness to make instruments of our bodies, to become comfortable with a life of 'self-actualisation' and its curious internalisation of the master-slave relation (a good idea of Baudrillard's, not mine). There is a finely-photographed metaphor for the rupture in the shot of Mikey, the dreamy, non-earthed elder son of the Carvers, wobbling at the end of a diving board slicked in wet ice, testing it for bounce above an emptied swimming pool in the wind and freezing rain of the ice storm.
Earlier we have seen Mikey and Wendy kiss one another passionately in this desolate pit, as it fills with dead leaves. Mikey desires her desperately, the film makes it clear, but he seems also to be suspicious of bodies and the corruption that goes on inside them, even if it is only rot at the level of the molecule. Smelling, he reads to his class from a homework sheet, is really like tasting, in that to smell something is to 'eat' the molecule that creates the odour. So, he concludes, think twice about what is happening when you smell another person's shit . On the night of the storm, Mikey tells Sandy that he is going out into the freezing air because the cold kills off all smells, and the air, being free of these molecules, is 'clean'. We know immediately that this sweet-natured, quietly morbid youth is going to die.
Many details glint appealingly among the heavy works of the larger themes in The Ice Storm. For the long familiarity of siblings, there is Wendy's often absent elder brother, Paul, whose train ride from home to a friend's place and back frames the story, seeing at once that his younger sister has nabbed a record from his collection by a tell-tale scratch that makes the needle jump in a certain place as she plays it. For the staleness of nuptial bliss, there are the buffeting waves of a water bed which threaten to toss its occupants on the floor when one sits on it, in a revenge of creature comforts bought in gayer, sillier times. For the horror of a dead son that Mikey's mother must confront on the morning after the storm, there is no confrontation at all: Sigourney Weaver's long elegant face only emerges from sleep in close-up, to the hoarse, nightmare-indistinct sound of her husband weeping at the other end of the house.
Daring ellipsis is one of the marks of a masterly director (think of the totally elided, because completely predictable, court case of the young murderer in Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing), and it is pleasing when it occurs not only for its economy but because of its complicty with the audience. Lee is not going to bludgeon us with the obvious; instead, recurrently in The Ice Storm, there are breath-taking turns; turn after turn. There is a turn in the playing out of Mikey's death, but the most haunting of all is at another point altogether, and its nature I will spare you. It terminates the film in such a devastating way because of its surprise - not an intrusive or jarring one, since it only magnifies the point being made, but a sheerly formal beauty of a turn, like the appearance of the pressed flower in the last seconds of Kiarostami's Where is My Friend's House - lifting and breaking the heart.
Why more fuss has not been made over The Ice Storm baffles me. I can only assume that the American public has been brutalised by Hollywood, and cannot assimilate the complexity and precision of Lee's work. A palate scorched daily by jalapeno peppers will not recognise a translucent burgundy: such tastes will need time and training to acquire. Until then know only that this film is evidence of just how fine American cinema could become - if it wanted to.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews