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Connecticut, 1 9 7 3, Thanksgiving. Student Paul Hood arrives via train from the University to spend the holidays with his family: sister Wendy and parents Ben and Elena. Ben is dissatisfied with his marriage and has an affair with Janey Carver, the wife of his neighbor Jim. Wendy is curious about sexuality and tests it out on the Carver teenage boys, Mikey and Sandy. At a key party where the guests swap partners, Elena and Jim have sex in the car. A curious Mikey walks across the city after an ice storm, but a branch causes a power line to fall on the guardrail, and since he is standing on a metal surface covered with water and ice, Mikey is electrocuted and killed. Ben finds his corpse and brings him to Jim's house. Ben later cries in the car.
Even though film critic Gene Siskel named it his no. 1 film of the year, Ang Lee's existentialist psychological drama "The Ice Storm" engages only partially. Filmed in a flat cinematography to emphasize the bland, routine and boring lives of two families stuck in an endless apathy during the 70s, the film is the strongest when it implies that people need some exit out of this grey routine, but fails to truly develop this theme or to give any answers. It starts out strong, with a brilliant monologue narrated by student Paul (Tobey Maguire) about the Fantastic Four as a symbol for family contradictions: "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 anti-matter. 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." The actors are excellent, especially Kevin Kline as dad Ben and Christina Ricci as teenage daughter Wendy, but they don't always get much to do to expand the story and their character development. In one of the most bizarre moments, the sexually curious Wendy puts a mask of Richard Nixon and has sex with the neighbor's teenage guy in the basement. However, the storyline has troubles articulating what it wants to say or what directions it should take. It just observes these characters stuck in a void, not knowing how to find a way to escapism to something more in life. As sudden as one character meets his death in the finale, so much is the ending abrupt and sudden—one might even wonder if that should have been the main plot in the middle of the film, exploring the effects on the two families, instead of just randomly appearing in the end without much time to develop the drama out of it.
Grade:++
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