COLD SORES
by Kristian Lin
I think Woody Allen started this. THE ICE STORM is the latest in a tradition of movies depicting sexually confused, emotionally repressed, dysfunctional suburban WASP families who live in oh-so-tastefully decorated houses and are fatally unable to relate to each other. It's a relatively new tradition; it couldn't have arrived without the changing moral climate and the political and social unrest that the 1960s and '70s brought to America. The changes in society coincided with changes in American filmmaking, as the studios collapsed and independent filmmakers were now free to take a hard look at the nuclear family's disintegration. Woody Allen's subjects in INTERIORS (1978) may have been Manhattanites and not suburbanites, but he seems to have been ahead of the curve. Two years later, ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980) snagged great reviews and an Academy Award for Best Picture. More recently, we've had SHORT CUTS and SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION captured the same angst in a rapidly changing American society.
THE ICE STORM revolves around Ben Hood (Kevin Kline), who lives with his wife Elena (Joan Allen) in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1973. His son Paul (Tobey Maguire) goes to school in New York and is trying to lose his virginity. His 14-year-old daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) is also out to lose her girlhood by flirting with both Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood), who lives nearby, and Mikey's younger brother Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd). Ben, meanwhile, is carrying on an affair with the boys' mother, Janey (Sigourney Weaver). The youngsters try to sort out their sexual feelings, and their parents aren't doing much better with theirs.
I should say that I've never cared for these movies. I think our society is still having problems reevaluating its morals, and these movies are right to point them out. It's just that these films tend to wallow in suburbia's moral malaise and come up short on the bigger picture. The people in THE ICE STORM seek psychotherapy and swap wives at their little parties, and none of it brings them fulfillment or enlightenment. In fact, nobody in this movie seems to enjoy themselves for even a moment, which makes it an ungodly drag. You ask yourself why these people don't convert to Judaism or take up skydiving or join a theater group or read Oscar Wilde. Maybe it's shallow of me to suggest that these things might solve their problems, but these characters are shallow - they don't have anything to do except be unhappy. The suburbs can be pretty dull, but intelligent, complex people manage to live there without being entirely miserable.
Like ORDINARY PEOPLE, THE ICE STORM comes with a literary pedigree, being based on Rick Moody's novel. James Schamus's screenplay adaptation suffers from arch, overly "literary" dialogue. Mikey explains that he's good at geometry but not at math by saying, "I get the concept that two times two equals four. Because it's a square. Not numbers, but space. It's perfect. Except that no one can draw a perfect square." I haven't read the book, but I suspect that philosophizing like this plays much better on the page than it does in a movie (not that it reads particularly well). The dialogue hamstrings all the actors, though Kevin Kline manages a few distinctive line readings the way he usually does. I'm also gratified at the casting of Christina Ricci, an actress whose, oh, I don't know, voluptuousness makes the character that much more real. Any Hollywood studio would have insisted on a supermodel-thin teenager, but the film acknowledges the libido of a girl who still has her baby fat, and doesn't mock it. The cast as a whole, though, seems as pale as Frederick Elmes's cinematography. Here's where director Ang Lee's good taste finally gets the better of him, as the wit and humor of his Taiwanese films and SENSE AND SENSIBILITY disappear almost completely here. There's a creepily funny scene where Wendy makes out with Mikey while wearing a Richard Nixon mask, but nobody here gets any pleasure out of cracking a joke.
Maybe I'm too harsh. Maybe, like so many disciples of the great Pauline Kael, I'm too severe to judge an austere piece like THE ICE STORM and too quick to latch onto something like BOOGIE NIGHTS, which maybe isn't any deeper as a critique of changing society but has moviemaking zest, vitality, jouissance, flava, what have you on its side. It just seems to me that these movies about modern-day repression tend to kill off their own dramatic possibilities - the characters may want to change, but they can't, and usually they don't have any idea how to go about it. It pushes a movie towards stasis. THE ICE STORM is a movie that's trapped under the ice, and it'll leave you feeling the same way.
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