White, upper-middle-class New England is accorded far more atmosphere than it deserves in The Ice Storm, a movie which turned 25 years old on Sep. 27th. It helps that Ang Lee’s 1997 film takes place in wintertime (as doubtlessly indicated by the title) – Connecticut’s barren forests and snowy, desolate landscapes provide an uncanny, existential shadow to what is very much a psychological slice-of-life dramedy and not the kind of meditative, almost Terence Malick-y mood piece that it sometimes pretends to be. Although … it is, in its course, both none and all of the above.
Based on Rick Moody’s 1994 book of the same name, The Ice Storm differs superficially from some of Lee’s later American works, which made much bigger splashes in the mainstream. But it is fundamentally the same as Brokeback Mountain or Life of Pi in that it is relentlessly obsessed with the human condition – or, to put it in more obnoxious terms, the “disease of living.”
The Ice Storm Plots Out the American Disease
Fox Searchlight Pictures
The “disease” part is emphasized because there does seem to be some kind of moral sickness, what Roger Waters referred to as a “creeping malaise,” permeating this area of the American Northeast, something which makes The Ice Storm one of the best films about suburbia. The time is the 1970s, Watergate – and it’s yet another point at which Americans are reckoning with the kinds of examples our leaders are setting, and whether we are, in fact, morally superior enough to rebuke them or just toothless enough to follow.
The film’s ostensible lead, Kevin Kline’s Ben Hood, falls into the latter camp, and his wife, Joan Allen’s Elena, falls into the former. Ben is a slapstick, disheveled Don Draper in a post-1960s Mad Men drained of all its allure. His kids (a young Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci) and his friends’ kids (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd) are physical embodiments of romantic and sexual angst. Maguire’s interactions with side characters played by Katie Holmes and David Krumholtz feel like deleted scenes from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, while Ricci and Wood’s feel like some strange alchemy of Stand By Me and Todd Solondz’s Happiness. And despite their resemblance, Maguire and Wood do not play siblings, nor do they even share screen time.
Rick Moody’s Ice Storm is Perfectly Cold
Meditations on nature (both human and cosmic), as elucidated by Wood’s musings on molecules and Maguire’s monologues on superheroes, are repeatedly subject to the gravitational pull of pervasive mundanity. But despite an icky parade of down-in-the-dirt sexual insecurities (Joan Allen getting hit on by a priest, an illicit encounter between Ricci and Wood involving a Nixon mask, an Allison Janney-sponsored key party that is everything else but fun), Lee’s film never loses sight of nature. In particular, it never loses sight of the trees.
As the film’s titular weather event proceeds to engulf the film’s final act, the story begins to feel slippery. We are treated to more and more shots of branches, covered in slick coatings of ice. There is so much ice here that it feels almost artificial, otherworldly, Tim-Burton-esque. And this is helped along by the stunning sound design courtesy of Eugene Gearty (credited) and Steve Hamilton (uncredited), whose sonic interpretations of an ice storm feel positively extra-terrestrial, like water freezing at 100 times the speed.
Of course, editor Tim Squyres never gets too carried away, always remembering that this is a film more about people than anything else. But this does not discount the possibility that the people themselves are leaves having fallen, or that the dead leaves littering the pool in Elijah Wood’s backyard are former people. Even in shots of dead trees establishing no civilization, it is undeniable that civilization has made its indelible mark, that the land is covered in the ashes of people’s sins, past and present. In The Ice Storm, the town of New Canaan is a living graveyard.
This Film About Death Remains So Alive Today
Death indeed runs rampant through this movie as subtext and perpetual threat, remarked upon most pointedly in a closing monologue from Tobey Maguire’s Paul Hood, whose words sound like a twisted version of a speech from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “When you think about it, it’s not easy to keep from just wandering out of life. It’s like someone’s always leaving the door open to the next world, and if you aren’t paying attention you could just walk through it, and then you’ve died.” It’s oppressively dark, as well as darkly hilarious, and it embodies the contradictions present at the heart of the film.
The Ice Storm seems to posit the popular maxim, “Life is short,” and then follows up by asking, “But so what?” The characters in this film are opportunists, living like there’s no tomorrow, wishing to die but being secretly, terribly afraid of whatever awaits them in the end.
Come for the cast, which, in addition to those mentioned above, includes an appropriately icy Sigourney Weaver and Jumanji’s Adam Hann-Byrd in an incredible performance. Stay for indie cinematographer Frederick Elmes’ subtle but mesmerizing, expressive imagery. Stay for Elijah Wood’s teenage agony. Stay, also, for Christina Ricci, who always seems to bring a little something extra to the table. And most of all, stay for the chameleonic Ang Lee, who does character just as well as Spielberg does set pieces. The Ice Storm, as cold and sad as it may be, is still essential, 25 years later.
