The Ice Storm: Criterion Collection DVD Review

Everyone in Ang Lee's excellent drama about 1970's suburbanites in New Canaan, Conn., is emotionally bankrupt, morally afloat, afraid of the truth, and mired in the pseudo-intellectual dogma of the time.

The film focuses on a period in our culture when suburban, middle-class families tried to play catch-up with the groundbreaking sexual revolution of the late 1960s.

The problem? Lee's characters aren't revolutionaries. Thus, when they gather at parties to swap wives for an evening of casual sex, drink and do drugs in an effort to anesthetize their own ridiculousness, or willingly put their lives at risk during an ice storm, they seem at once shocked and rattled when they're slapped with the deadly repercussions of their own reckless behavior.

Lee strings a wealth of deeper issues throughout his film, but the characters are incapable of dealing with those issues. Why? Because in their emotional timidity and immaturity, they seem determined to live their lives solely on the surface, where things appear relatively safe and manageable--even while their lives are crumbling around them.

For instance, Elena Hood (Joan Allen) knows perfectly well that her husband, Ben (Kevin Kline), is having an affair with their neighbor, Janey (Sigourney Weaver), but does she confront him with it? Of course not--that would mean stripping away the layers of her life and realizing that it's not just empty, but a lie.

At Thanksgiving dinner, Elena's savvy daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), is asked by her father to give grace, which itself is a joke as these people bring agnostic to a whole new level. Still, Wendy seizes the moment and launches into an inspired diatribe that manages to include materialism, napalm, and how the white man stole this land from American Indians.

When Ben shouts at her to shut up, it's a pivotal moment that rings clear. How can these people deal with the pending impeachment of Nixon, napalm, and everything else that is wrong with the world, when they can't even have a civil meal together?

That they can't is Lee's point.

Rated R. Grade: A