Cinema
The Ice Storm (15, selected cinemas)
Speaking from experience . . .
Mark Steyn
he problem with The Ice Storm is the ice storm. To be honest, I didn't pay it much heed the first time I saw the film, although I thought it a pretty pathetic Dis- neyfied affair — just a bit of decorative sil- very-blue rime twinkling on the trees. A week or so later, I happened to be caught in 'the ice storm of the century' in Quebec: that was a month ago, and tens of thou- sands of people in the Monteregie are still without light and heat and power. In the celluloid version, the storm frames the drama, and what comes between is the old internalisation-of-the-landscape routine: the frozen wastes of 1970s morality, as charted by the quietly desperate denizens of New Canaan, Connecticut, dull con- scripts in the sexual revolution.
An ice storm is a peculiar combination of circumstances in which, if you'll forgive a meteorological note, precipitation falls as rain from the warmer air in the upper atmosphere but freezes the moment it lands on anything down below: hence, every limb of every tree is coated in a hard, thick tube of ice. This is more or less the condition of the principals in Ang Lee's film. Truth is often stranger than metaphor, and in the last month I've found myself brooding on the differences between my ice storm and Ang Lee's: I hadn't the slightest desire, for example, to have sex with Sigourney Weaver in a cheesecloth shirt. Besides, after cautiously shuffling along on sheets of ice for a couple of days, most of us had groin strains.
But my objection isn't really practical. The Ice Storm's ice storm is pressed into service of the film's theme — the moral emptiness of the time and place. On the 'night it occurs, the New Canaanites are at a key party' — you remember, where wives pluck car keys from a bowl and go home with whomsoever they belong to — and the most pitiful participant is the town's trendy vicar, as big a pussy hound as any of the other guys, though with grimmer prospects. I know everything's weedier and wussier in Connecticut, but it seems to me this is the very opposite of what an ice storm is. An ice storm is awesome: millions upon mil- lions of trees are bent to the ground or snapped in two, like a vast retinue of courtiers prostrating themselves before some grand omnipotence. It's an image of spiritual power rather than spiritual absence. Or so you'd have thought. But not here. In the course of Ang Lee's storm, one person will die, but the principals' reaction will be itself a form of deadness.
This odd misreading sums up Lee's rather touching inability to make head or tail of this story. He did a terrific job with Seim and Sensibility but has evidently found this crowd bewilderingly foreign in a way that Jane Austen's crew weren't. The houses — those bleak Seventies 'contem- poraries' plonked on isolated lots in the woods — might as well come from another planet. The clothes, the hair, the water-bed • .. all lovingly recreated yet never sent up. Most of the colours are muted beiges and turquoises, like a 1970s Open University programme that's been repeated once too often. There are no pop records on the soundtrack, only an incredibly pretentious orchestral score by the strikingly spelt Mychael Danna, whose pseudo-Balinese gamelan effects are, I suppose, meant to evoke that jingly-jangly ringing you get from gently iced trees, when the whole forest becomes a set of wind chimes.
As a result of these oddly disconnected components, the film has, for Hollywood, an engagingly unmanipulative tone, as if it doesn't care whether you think it's a sear- ing drama or a preposterous comedy. Almost any other director would play the car-keys-in-the-ring scene for laughs, for pathos, for something. But Lee just tags along, as if utterly flummoxed by it. If it's deliberate, it's hard to tell, but there's a kind of logic to it: The Ice Storm is a film about couples who've lost their bearings, made by a director who never seems to have found his. Kevin Kline, as the surpris- ingly flat male lead, takes a similar line, wandering through the film as if he's meant to be somewhere else but can't remember where.
The wife he cheats on is played by Joan Allen, whose character has a glassy-eyed look and not much else. The best friend's wife he cheats with is a harshly pho- tographed and sour-mouthed Sigourney Weaver, who's far scarier here than in Alien: during the sex scene with Kline, I could swear the temperature in the cinema dropped 20 degrees. Otherwise, the best performance is that of Richard Nixon as himself, his slow presidential unravelling forming the television backdrop to events in New Canaan. As Nixon's upper lip sweats with shame, the brave new pioneers of suburban Connecticut plough relentless- ly on, in a world from which all sense of shame has been banished. How bizarre that a quarter-century on, in the latest presiden- tial unwinding, the roles are reversed: Mr Clinton trumpets the sexual morality of New Canaan, while the rest of America recoils from the television set in Nixon-like shame.
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