Ang Lee (1997)
After the well-deserved success of Sense and Sensibility (1995), his Hollywood breakthrough, Ang Lee directed a much more recent period drama. Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm, first published in 1994, was adapted for the screen by Lee’s regular collaborator, James Schamus. Set over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, The Ice Storm is a dysfunctional middle-class family tragicomedy. Not a few of those were made, as contemporary film stories, in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the New Hollywood was quick off the mark exploring grievously flawed familial relationships in movies as different as The Graduate (1967), Five Easy Pieces (1970) and Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973). These pictures weren’t linked explicitly to recent or current national traumas – the Kennedy and King assassinations and, especially, Vietnam – but nonetheless tapped into a larger prevailing pessimism in America. Placed in this context, The Ice Storm runs the risk of seeming surplus to requirements and secondhand, but you watch it hoping the passage of years may have enabled new insights into the period. The hopes are disappointed: Lee’s film is interesting chiefly in relation to those earlier zeitgeist pieces – and to Hollywood parent-children melodramas of an earlier vintage.
By late 1973, Watergate and the sexual revolution were both in full swing. They are, respectively, persistent background to and centre stage in The Ice Storm. A television is often on in the homes of the Hoods and the Carvers, the two Connecticut families who supply all the film’s main characters; TV news reports are dominated by Watergate headlines, including statements by and interviews with Richard Nixon. These place Lee’s narrative nearly as precisely in time as news film of the presidential motorcade in Dallas would have pinpointed a story set a decade earlier. Fourteen-year-old Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) is both vociferously anti-Nixon and into sexual experimentation or, at least, foreplay – with Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood) and his younger brother, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), boys whom Wendy and her sixteen-year-old brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), have known since childhood. As she and Mikey are about to get it together, Wendy is delighted to spot a Nixon party mask lying on a nearby sofa. She wears the grotesque mask throughout her session with Mikey until it’s interrupted by the unexpected entrance of Wendy’s father, Ben (Kevin Kline). Ben is in the Carver house at the time because that’s where he conducts his secret affair with Mikey and Jim’s mother, Janey (Sigourney Weaver). It’s not in fact much of a secret to Ben’s wife, Elena (Joan Allen), who suspects what’s going on, though Janey’s husband, Jim (Jamey Sheridan), doesn’t. No one would mistake Jim, Elena or Ben for a swinger (though Janey is a different matter). On the Friday night of Thanksgiving weekend, however, both couples are guests at a party that turns out to be a key party.
The party also coincides with the storm that gives the film its title. Like a lot of screen weather, this is heavily symbolic, rather as setting the story at Thanksgiving, highlight of the American family year, is freighted with (obvious) ironic meaning. There are moments when the storm’s symbolic importance completely dominates its real implications: no one at the key party suggests, in view of the freezing, dangerous weather conditions, that this may not, after all, be a good night for guests to head off with an unknown quantity in the driving seat. For the younger generation, though, the storm does have actual consequences. Paul, home for the weekend from his boarding school in New York, has returned there for the evening to pursue his courtship of a classmate, Libbets Casey (Katie Holmes), though when he arrives at her apartment, Paul finds Libbets already in the company of his boarding-school roommate, Francis Davenport (David Krumholtz). Hours later, Paul dashes to Grand Central to catch the last train back to New Canaan (a real Connecticut town though this choice of location also has an ironic-symbolic flavour, given the milk-and-honey connotations of the biblical Canaan). A power outage caused by the storm leaves Paul’s train stranded halfway between New York and New Canaan until next morning. Mikey Carver, meanwhile, decides to wander through woodland, entranced by the beauty of the ice-covered trees, and to sit on a guardrail. A falling tree takes down a power line that connects with the guardrail. Mikey is fatally electrocuted.
Unlike the three New Hollywood films mentioned above, The Ice Storm gives roughly equal screen time to parents and children. Mike Nichols’ The Graduate is all about Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock: his parents’ friend Mrs Robinson is a major character, of course, but only because she seduces Benjamin. Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is all about the Jack Nicholson character, Bobby Dupea, old enough to be a parent but childless: Bobby is chiefly the drop-out son of an upper middle-class family; his father is now wheelchair-bound and deprived by illness of the power of speech. In Gilbert Cates’ Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, Joanne Woodward’s Rita Walden is a wife and mother but her marriage receives more attention than her motherhood: her two grown-up children have, in their different ways, escaped Rita’s soul-destroying world – the daughter by making a happier marriage of her own, the son by emigrating to Europe with his male lover. The interval between when The Ice Storm is set and when the book and film appeared allows us to see its two generations from a different perspective. In the mid-1990s, Paul, Wendy and Sandy would be roughly the same age their parents were in the mid-1970s, when Elena, Ben, Janey and Jim were near contemporaries of Bobby Dupea (albeit a decade or so older than Benjamin Braddock), and part of a newly permissive world. Yet The Ice Storm still appears to blame the older generation for the younger’s difficulties – just as parents were to blame in films like Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961) and, indeed, The Graduate.
Production notes for The Ice Storm, which were part of the BFI handout for this screening, refer to Ang Lee’s earlier films (set in both New York and Taipei but featuring mainly Asian or American-Asian characters), in which traditional and modernising attitudes are at odds but the father figure in the story is always ‘wise’ and ‘dignified’. Those adjectives, say the notes, ‘are hardly the words to describe … befuddled anti-hero Ben Hood, or any of the other parents in the film, who are too preoccupied with their own need for “self-realisation” to set an example for their children’. In the quote from Lee that follows, his tone is rather more forgiving: ‘The whole nation is in an adolescent period, experimenting with new things, new rules – even the adults are behaving like adolescents’. But that’s not the prevailing tone of The Ice Storm, which is less sympathetic than censuring of the ‘grown-ups’ – and lightened up only through presenting them, Ben especially, as laughable.
Kevin Kline has a pretty thankless task – Ben is a pompous, uneasily jollifying windbag. In bed with Janey, when he starts talking golf, she tells him to stop, that he’s a bore. She’s right but we already knew this about Ben. Kline is at his best in the few bits where he’s able to act more simply and sincerely, as when, leaving the Carver place after their differently aborted sex sessions there, Wendy is too tired to walk further, her father carries her the rest of the way home, as he used to do when she was younger, and you feel Ben’s relief in experiencing loving nostalgia. From the word go, Joan Allen’s Elena is so neatly competent and impersonal that it’s obvious the Hoods’ marriage has died well before that starts to be revealed in dialogue and incident. Sigourney Weaver instantly magnetises the camera and is never less than striking but the narrative supplies no sense of why Janey is so thoroughly dissatisfied – or how, since there’s no suggestion that she feels constrained by convention, her loveless marriage could have lasted even in name. Janey doesn’t seem keen on her children, let alone her husband. The role of Jim is much smaller than that of the other three parents but at least Jamey Sheridan’s grief, when Mikey’s lifeless body is brought home, is affecting. When that happens, Janey is still sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s party and its aftermath: she gradually wakes, puzzled by the sound of her husband’s sobs, and that’s the last seen of her. As it must be: given how the character is written and played, the film’s tragic climax can’t accommodate Janey.
Among the cast’s younger generation, Tobey Maguire is likeably good-humoured. The quasi-sex scenes involving Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd – respectively sixteen, fifteen and fourteen when filming took place – might nowadays be thought questionable but that’s not the only reason why these sequences make for uncomfortable viewing. Another is that the three young actors seem to have been cast for their somewhat eccentric looks (Christina Ricci was already famous for playing Wednesday in the two Addams Family films earlier in the decade). Besides, Ang Lee directs these scenes uncertainly. He handles the key party, and the selection of keys, with much more confidence. He’s much helped by Allison Janney, in one of her earliest cinema roles – as Dot Halford, who hosts the party. It’s a small part but Janney’s presence and brio are a shot in the arm to The Ice Storm every second she’s on screen. Dot is avidly interested in who gets whose keys yet never stops being the perfect, considerate hostess.
The script is persistently overwritten. (Not having read the source material, I don’t know how much this is a legacy of the novel.) The film begins with Paul on his long-delayed train journey home, looking at a comic book. His voiceover explains that in the November 1973 issue of the Fantastic Four:
‘Reed Richards has to use his antimatter weapon on his own son who Annihilus has turned into a human atom bomb. It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four because they weren’t like other superheroes; they were more like a family. 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 antimatter. 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.’
As the monologue reaches its end, the train pulls into New Canaan station: Paul’s parents and sister are on the platform to meet him. Next comes a teaching session, where Libbets impresses not just Paul with her looks but also their teacher with her insights into Dostoyevsky and existentialism. A few screen minutes later, Elena happens to see Wendy riding her bicycle along a street in New Canaan and, at home that evening, tells her daughter that she ‘looked very free when I saw you, as if I were seeing my own memories of being a girl … there was something internal about it’. By this stage, you’re getting suspicious that the characters are speaking with essentially the same voice – an educated voice that seems anxious to convince you how clever the dialogue’s author is too. In one of the film’s clumsiest bits, Elena, after envying Wendy’s youthfulness, gets on a bike herself, then goes to a store where she also tries and fails to emulate her daughter by shoplifting (not that Elena saw Wendy shoplifting). Where Wendy stared down the accusatory looks of a woman shopper, her mother is called out by a store detective and shamefully admits her theft – further proof, presumably, that Elena is no longer a carefree teenager. There’s no follow-up whatsoever to her petty crime.
Ang Lee’s background and earlier work encouraged reasonable expectations that he would bring to this account of materially comfortable WASP lives in the 1970s a curious but understanding outsider’s eye – as he did to Sense and Sensibility. Sad to say, The Ice Storm mostly comes across as a routine treatment of failed and faithless adult relationships, of adolescent explorations of sex and drugs (the latter in the sequence chez Libbets). Some of the film’s best moments are supplied by effective rhyming images. Paul desperately sprints down a slope at Grand Central to catch his train; Mikey ecstatically slides down an icy woodland declivity on his back, moments before sitting on the guardrail. Ben carries Wendy home on the afternoon before the storm begins, lifts Mikey’s corpse from the woods in the first light of the morning after. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes makes the accumulations of ice extraordinarily beautiful, whether in nighttime landscapes or on a train undercarriage. (The domestic interiors sometimes seem underlit, though.) The other half of the BFI handout was Lizzie Francke’s Sight and Sound (February 1998) review of The Ice Storm. Francke admiringly illustrates visual aspects of the period mise-en-scène – ‘crocheted tank tops’, the ‘discordant mix of two-or-so decades’ funishings’ in the Hoods’ home, the Carvers’ ‘cool Philip Johnson-style glass house that ostensibly signals openness about their lives’. I admit these things passed me by, but I still think they provide no more than dramatic context.
When Lee eventually turns up the sympathy dial, it’s too late in the day. The gathering at the entrance to the Carvers’ home, when Mikey is returned there, is no more than a tableau of grief, scored to Mychael Danna’s suddenly sensitive music. The narrative then returns to its starting point, for Paul to set foot on the platform and his family to break the news to him about Mikey. In the closing sequence, the four Hoods are in their car; Ben sobs and Elena tries to comfort him, in what seems a shared outburst of contrition. The emotion feels artificial and the scene fails to move. But it does remind you how far Ang Lee progressed to deliver the wrenching finale to Brokeback Mountain (2005), as Heath Ledger buttoned that shirt, adjusted that postcard and closed the cupboard door.
26 September 2025
