The Ice Storm

Rating:
Summary: Crystalline perfection
Review: I just finished watching this movie with my wife. Wow. It's extremely refreshing, as someone who actually lived through the '70s at the same stage as these kids (and, in my case, grew up in a similar social milieu) to see a movie that gets it right. Lee, unlike most Hollywood directors, avoids the trap of going overboard with clothes, hairstyles and cultural references when depicting an era in recent memory. They're there, but to the extent that they actually were there at the time. (In fact, he leaves in some anachronisms ... when Christina Ricci steals from the drugstore, the Tampax boxes behind her are contemporary). As a result, he can let the actors focus on the characters. Kline is great, Allen lets one of her repressed wives finally get some action at the end, but Sigourney Weaver does the best job of making you think you've never seen any other movie with her in it. I also love Elmes' cinematography ... his best work since <i>Blue Velvet</i>. He uses the Connecticut woods and modernistic interiors, cool colors and earth tones extraordinarily well. The real and figurative coldness that thus saturates the film can actually make you want to put on a sweater. Lee also gets credit for one of the most sublime (and thus, ahem, shocking) death scenes since <i>Slaughterhouse-Five</i> near the end of the movie. My only complaints would be that a) the film too often leaves one character or the other hanging for too long while it concentrates on other plot threads and b) Lee is a little too overboard with his symbolism, showing characters breaking ice or opening refrigerators more than necessary for us to get the point.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Films of 1997
Review: "The Ice Storm" was one of the most haunting and visually hypnotic films of 1997. The entire cast turn in excellent performances, especially the young cast which include Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire, Katie Holmes and Elijah Wood. One of the most impressive performances was from Sigourney Weaver as Janey Carver. She had a small but pivitol role which garnered her a Golden Globe nomination and British Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. I was very disappointed that not only her but others in the cast were overlooked when it came to the Oscar nominations in 1997. The whole issue around family suburbia during the sexual revelution was very well presented on film due to Ang Lee's superb direction. Even though Ang Lee didn't receive the well-deserved recognition for his direction of this film, he would go on to earn a nomination for "Sense & Sensibility". "The Ice Storm" also earned the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival but no Oscar-nomination. I highly recommend this film to anyone who enjoys a visually haunting film with impressive performances from an excellent ensemble cast.

Rating:
Summary: Let's all revise our memories of the past..Right now!
Review: I'm not sure how to categorize this movie, exactly, it looks like satire, but it smells like science fiction and it sounds like a bad sitcom. The people in it have a hodge-podge cartoony look, like vague memories not of New Canaan in the 1970s but of Police Story (especially the Weaver character) or The Brady Bunch (Mr. Kline). It resembles the suburban 70s about as much as Roger Corman's Psych-Out does Haight Ashbury in the 60s.

This is Hollywood revising America's past to accomodate the tastes and snobberies and laziness of their contemporary market. Hey, did you feel left out of the "real world" when you were a kid? Hate your mom and dad? Even a teensie bit? Want to make fun of the way you (think you) remember they dressed, and acted? Well, here's a great catharsis we can all enjoy together: Go see Ice Storm.

Rating:
Summary: There Aren't Too Many Like This One!
Review: This is a very remarkable film to see connected with the word "Hollywood." It is fairly stunning visually, aurally, acting-wise, script-wise, in fact: pretty much everything-wise! If you're looking for a movie to shake you up (Come on, you've got to have a dose of that some time!)this is the one. Lee creates a whole world, taking us into the vulnerabilities of his characters in a way that will make you weep, flinch,and maybe even think! He gets startlingly honest and unstarry performances from his whole cast, not least the stunning Joan Allen and the kind of acting some of us had given-up hoping for from Kevin Kline...

This is what film-making is about (sorry, I said 'film' not 'movie'!)- real visceral use of the medium, rather than simply feeding us baby-food. Watch, and be moved for a change.

Rating:
Summary: A Necessary Evil
Review: "The Ice Storm" is a film that is so layered with symbolic meaning that it demands multiple viewings. Otherwise, it would be much too easy to brush off the film as a cold, depressing, and pointlessly bleak portrait of the lives it depicts.

On one level, Ang Lee's film is about two upper-middle class New England families--the Hoods and the Carvers--and how they are forever impacted by the sexual revolution of the 1970s. On another level, this film concerns the healthy balance that Nature provides and how subverting this balance can lead to destructive, and even tragic, consequences.

In both the Hood family and the Carver family, the parents essentially behave like children, while the children, who have no reliable (or respectable) authority figures to supervise them, stumble precariously into the arena of adult sexual awakening. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) and Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver) engage in an extramarital affair with one another because their spouses do not sexually satisfy them; Ben's wife Elena (Joan Allen) is frigid and Janey's husband Jim (Jamey Sheridan) is impotent. Essentially, Ben and Janey are so engulfed in their own selfish wants that they are oblivious to the potentially destructive consequences of their actions on their families.

But their spouses are certainly not without foibles of their own. Elena Hood suffers from a mid-life crisis of sorts that leaves her longing to be free of adult responsibilities. In one scene, Elena watches wistfully as her daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) rides past her on her bicycle, and a bit later we see Elena herself ride a bicycle into town and get caught shoplifting, which, incidentally, is a petty crime that her daughter is also involved in. And then there is Jim Carver--the clueless, mad scientist type who is so obsessed with his work that he has never learned to communicate with his own children. When he asks his sons Mikey (Elijah Wood) and Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd) how school is going, the boys are so puzzled by what should be a mundane inquiry that they cannot give a coherent response.

Indeed, failure of communication is a theme that is prevalent throughout "The Ice Storm." Just as Jim cannot talk directly to his children, so Ben fails to do so with his own. There is a notable scene in a car between Ben and his son Paul (Tobey Maguire) in which Ben awkwardly attempts to broach the subject of masturbation. It is obvious to everyone but Ben that Paul is at a stage of adolescence where he would be fully aware of such issues. The puzzled look on Paul's face confirms his own astonishment at his father's cluelessness. Similarly, when Janey Sheridan scolds Wendy Hood for sexually coming on to her younger son Sandy, she does so not through a forceful reprimand but by spouting out obscure, irrelevant facts about Eastern cultural traditions.

What becomes painfully clear as "The Ice Storm" progresses is that the lives of these two families are slowly but surely spiraling out of control, and someone is ultimately going to have to pay for these sins. The time of reckoning finally arrives on the night that both the Hood and the Carver adults converge on a key party while a fierce ice storm strikes the area. The key party--in which the husbands toss their keys in a jar and the wives sleep with the men whose keys they randomly fish out--marks the lowest possible point of moral abandonment by the Hoods and the Carvers. Director Ang Lee effectively intercuts these crucial scenes to reveal that as the party progresses inside, so the ice storm rages outside--as if to vent Nature's fury at the chaos that man consistently chooses to embrace over the natural order.

When the storm finally clears, and the effect of the alcohol wears off, what rises with the morning mist is a tragic revelation that wrenches all characters from their careless moral and spiritual slumbers. This is a devastating finale, and what is even more heartbreaking is the silent understanding that, for these two families, tragedy was clearly a necessary evil.

Rating:
Summary: A Storm of Cinematic Prowess
Review: All those who have not yet seen the Ice Storm are simply virgins to film. Based on the tragically comic novel by Rick Moody, the screen version encompasses equal wit, heartache and intelligence as it follows the disintegrating lives of two New England families. The story carefully observes how the actions of parents can affect their children, specifically focusing on the impact of adultery, vanishing love and mistrust set amidst the sexual revolution and 70's kitsch. An ice storm then occurs, acting as a powerful metaphore for such proceedings, as well as drawing a tearful close to the film itself. A superior script allows for poignant performances, most notably from Christina Ricci as the alienated and Lolitaesque daughter of Kevin Kline and Joan Allen, and also from Sigourney Weaver as Kline's married mistress.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Movie of 1997 and then some
Review: I rented this movie on a Christmas Eve last year and haven't been the same since. The sadness, the angst, the coldness of our modern existence are all laid out here for all to see. Desperately, the characters try to add some sort of pleasure to their staid suburban lives but end up feeling cold....Sigourney Weaver blows me away with her performance, she should always do serious dramatic work instead of being exploited into "comedy" or disasters like Alien Resurrection. The young tobey maguire is heartwrenching, his voice overs are incredibly moving. I love every aspect of this film and I think that it is sad that American Beauty, a completely inferior film takes home oscars while The Ice Storm was virtually ignored. Forget the no-talent establisment Kevin Spacey and go for this film to see a Kevin Kline you've never seen before.

Rating:
Summary: Understated and scary
Review: The previous reviewer is dead on with the comment that Lee is kind to his hurting protagonists. This movie could have been another one of those 'we're so superior' sendups of an awful era. Instead, Lee feels sympathy for a group of people who were caught up in a time of such uncertainty. All the characters rise to the occassion to deliver graceful performances of confused people.

This movie is darn good looking, too. The ice storm scenes were fantastic and just as I can recall as well. The hair styles, sets and clothes were accurate and not overdone - it makes me think more forgivingly of the fashion sins of the time.

Rating:
Summary: One of the decade's best
Review: Gene Siskel was dead on when he named The Ice Storm the best film of 1997. It's visual style resonates, and the performances are wonderfully true.

Ang Lee's camera is respectful... it is easy to imagine the exploitative qualities this film could've undertaken with a different director, but Lee is (smartly) tender towards his hurting subjects.

Rating:
Summary: Best of Intentions Gone Awry.
Review: As a book, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm was a fitting testimony to some of the harsh realities of being a 'baby-boomer'. The indulgence, the confusion, the dysfunction--told with reverence, painfully, honestly. Good enough.

But there's some artsy know-it-alls in New York who are just the right age, to have been on the wrong end of the 70's -and they further want to show us how bad they had it. They are selfish, small people. And we're so tired of their act, that we hardly listen to them anyway. So they scream louder. And we could really care less.

So they make a movie about their pain. Which to them is the loudest scream they can make. And we really could care less.

Wasted on this effort are some first rate talent, Kevin Kline should be perfect, as should Sigourney Weaver and Joan Allen, and as maestro who better than Ang Lee, the artisan to craft this work? All wasted.

Instead of painfully honest, it's just painful. Stay away if you can.