In Suburbia, circa 1973, however, most of the principals in "The Ice Storm" seem content to follow the lyrics of the Hombres' hit and "let it all hang out." Even the young reverend attends a local swingers' party, noting (via a scary metaphor) that "sometimes the shepherd needs the company of the sheep."
Everyone who wants company seems to find it. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) carries on a dead-end affair with neighbor Jane (Sigourney Weaver), the quintessential bored housewife, who rejects Ben's attempts at afterglow intimacy. "I have a husband," she snaps. "I don't particularly feel the need for another." Ben's teenage daughter Wendy (the brilliant Christina Ricci, a long way from "Casper" and "That Darn Cat") makes time with both of Jane's sons, the overly sensitive Mikey (Elijah Wood) and the twisted Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), a budding psycho who graduates from blowing up toy planes to savaging rose bushes with a whip. Even Ben's wife Elena (Joan Allen), after a failed attempt to release her pent-up sexual tension through shoplifting, begins looking for a more satisfying outlet.
The irony, of course, is that even though there's plenty of physical togetherness, emotionally everyone is on their own channel. And, often it seems as if director Ang Lee is purposely keeping these needy characters at arm's length as well, and his frequent cutaways to shots of ice cubes, ice cube trays and ice buckets are not exactly the most subtle way to let us know what he thinks of the residents of New Canaan.
But "The Ice Storm" is most effective at capturing the desperately hip attitude that seemed to hang like incense smoke around upper-middle-class/lower-middle-age adults in the early years of the Me Decade. From the huge Peter Pan collars that sprout from the shirts of the men to bedside copies of "Watership Down" and "When She Was Good," Lee's film is a catalogue of scary '70's trendiness, and it climaxes with a wife-swapping "key party" ("one of those California things," a participant notes, excitedly) that today seems as peculiar as an Aztec ceremony. Somehow in the wake of AIDS, it's easier to relate to the sexually repressive atmosphere of "The Wings of the Dove" than the wildly self-indulgent free-for-alls of "The Ice Storm." James Sanford
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