The Ice Storm (1997)

Ang Lee's 1997 adaptation of Rick Moody's novel arrives with the patience of a winter that will not break. Set in an affluent Connecticut suburb over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, the film follows two neighboring families as they pursue infidelity, liquor, and a key party in a vain attempt to feel something. Lee and screenwriter James Schamus keep the camera at a polite distance, the correct choice for material this quietly devastating. The result is a drama of manners in which the manners have rotted through.

The film does extend genuine interiority to its women. Elena Hood, played with weary grace by Joan Allen, and Janey Carver, brittle and glamorous in Sigourney Weaver's hands, are trapped in roles that have shrunk around them. Christina Ricci's Wendy is a teenage malcontent with alarming momentum. This is sympathy, not sermonizing, and the picture offers no instruction on how we ought to feel about any of them. Elsewhere the ledger is bare. Race never enters the frame, and the homogeneous suburb is presented without comment. There are no queer characters, no body-affirming arc, no environmental parable bolted onto the weather, and no eat-the-rich thesis, though the rich are certainly available for eating.

The storm of the title is weather, not warning. It kills a boy because a tree falls on a power line, which is how ice storms have always worked. Lee declines to turn grief into a lesson, and the final scene, a father sobbing at the wheel while his family looks on, lands because nobody explains it. The film is a period piece that does not rewrite the period. It simply lets the cold do its work, and the cold is enough. There is nothing here to applaud in the contemporary sense, only a quiet, well-made sadness that asks for our attention and then, with admirable restraint, leaves us alone with it.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}