THE ICE STORM By Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Fox Searchlight Pictures Director: Ang Lee Writer: James Schamus Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Elijah Wood, Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire, Adam Hann-Byrd. "A rotten fish stinks from the head down." "Like father, like son." "When it rains, it pours." These are just some of the proverbs illustrated by Ang Lee in the film which opened the 1997 New York Film Festival, "The Ice Storm." The Taiwanese director, who moved to the United States in 1978 and proceeded to dissect social mores of 19th Century England in "Sense and Sensibility," and explore the estrangement of a Taipei master chef from his three daughters in "Eat Drink Man Woman," has again done a superb job of commenting on family values. This time the action has shifted to the upper-middle-class America of the early 1970s, as Lee probes the pathologies which seem to have seeped down from the Nixon presidency to infect the lives of Connecticut families of the chief executive's social class. Whether Lee is suggesting some parallel between the corruption of the administration and domestic debauchery, or is making a statement about the sinfulness stimulated by suburbia, or perhaps even observing the silliness of the seventies, is not consequential. What is notable is that he spreads out before us a lush banquet of neatly observed perverse fare in James Schamus's deft adaptation of a recent, well-received novel by Rick Moody. Why choose 1973 as the time of the action? This period in America embodies the culmination of a dramatic experiment in lifestyles which began perhaps in 1968 with the disruption of the Democratic National Convention and was characterized by experimentation with sexual freedom, a display of garish wearing apparel which includes orange, polyester garments, the widespread use of mind-altering drugs such as LSD and cocaine, and an implicit encouragement of people to do their own thing even if their actions conflicted with responsibilities to their children. Lee focuses on two families, the Hoods and the Carvers. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) and his quietly suffering wife Elena (Joan Allen) have one 16-year-old son, Paul (Tobey Maguire) in prep school and daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) who is beginning to test her sexual allure on both Carver children. Jim Carver (Jamey Sheridan), who is frequently out of town on business leaves his wife Janey (Sigourney Weaver) free to dabble in a joyless affair with Ben, and his two boys Mikey (Elijah Wood) and Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd) unfettered by normal parental guidance. The film spends a good deal of its 113 minutes surveying the activities of the children, which appear to parallel the sordid ventures of the adults. In one unusual scene Wendy dons a Nixon mask and begins some heavy petting with Mikey, only to be caught by Wendy's dad, Ben, who happened to be conducting his assignation with Janey in the upstairs room. Ben's wife Elena, who suspects the goings-on of her husband but represses her anger, takes out her rebellion by shoplifting lipstick from the local pharmacy. Her daughter Wendy does likewise. The climactic scene takes place at a wife-swapping party attended by the well-to-do suburbanites in the area, a gathering which follows a California custom known as the key party. Male celebrants toss their car keys into a bowl and begin to drink, smoke, and mingle. Hours later, each woman dips into the vessel and goes home with the owner of the keys she has selected. During the merrymaking an ice storm has moved into the town of New Canaan, Connecticut, a blizzard which acts as metaphor to the coldness of family life among the Hoods, the Carvers, and others of their social class. The entire story is narrated by Paul, the Hoods' sixteen-year-old son. He has come home for the Thanksgiving weekend in the desperate hope that he and his family could spend a joyful and loving weekend together under the roof of their lavish home and give thanks for the material and spiritual splendors which life in America affords for so many. Instead he is confronted by the dissipation of those who would guide him: a father who hides an inability to communicate with him with a flurry of fatuous phrases, a mother too depressed to instill gladness in his heart, and a sister who reaches out for love by provoking sexual encounters with a boy in his early teens and the child's brother. Kevin Kline comes across once again as one of America's great actors, able to coax hilarity from movies like "In and Out" and "Fierce Creatures" and well-executed pathos from his current work. He is supported by a crackerjack group of young stars like Elijah Wood, Adam Hann-Byrd, Tobey Maguire and especially Christina Ricci and by a the two women in his life, Sigourney Weaver as a dragon lady who combines withering remarks with her sexual calisthenics and Joan Allen in her signature role of eternally anguished wife. "The Ice Storm" proves that a movie can most effectively and entertainingly study the disintegration of a society without soap-opera melodramatics or blazingly photographed uproars. "The Ice Storm" combines comedy and tragedy productively, a solid, intelligent, adult drama of people who should have everything going for them but forsake their good fortune in an array of excesses. Rated PG-13. Running Time: 113 minutes. (C) 1997 Harvey Karten
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