1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 95: The ice storm
In A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese, a midlife-crisis sufferer, paces nervously in his underwear. He’s in a strange house, waiting for his lover.
Mr. Hood – Kevin Kline, Cleese’s Wanda castmate – does the same in The Ice Storm (1997). Kline doesn’t quite play it for laughs, but the situation is amusing – especially when Mr. Hood goes downstairs and finds his teenage daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), fooling around with little Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood).
Wendy has put on a Nixon mask. (It’s 1973.)
Why are you here, Mr. Hood asks her.
Later, he tells his wife what he caught Wendy doing.
Why were YOU at the Carvers’, asks Mrs. Hood (Joan Allen).
Mr. Hood is taken aback. The marriage has gone so stale that he has forgotten to disguise his affair with Mrs. Carver (Sigourney Weaver).
(Mrs. Hood also has a vice: she shoplifts.)
The affair is stale, too. Mrs. Carver tells Mr. Hood that he’s boring. He is, but she’s cruel about it. She leaves him in her bedroom, gets in her car, and drives away.
Humiliating her husband and her lover – simultaneously, if possible – is how she gets her kicks.
Her son, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), a quiet, shy boy, also displays a touch of sadism. (It says something that he is one of the most likeable, or least despicable, characters.)
He blows up toys in the back yard.
Play with the whip instead, his mother tells him.
Mikey, Sandy’s brother, is a gifted student whose mind is in the clouds. He worries about molecules that drift through the air into people’s bodies.
He’s a chip off the old block. His father, Mr. Carver (Jamey Sheridan), a scientist, is like a planet with a huge irregular orbit. Kindly but distracted, he passes near his family once every few earth-decades.
The Carvers and Hoods live in New Caanan – an apt name, what with the regression of morals – on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Other suburban dramas have been filmed or located there: The Swimmer, Revolutionary Road, and Nicole Kidman’s Stepford Wives.
The scenery is as important as the story. Look at those houses!
(Nowadays, you can tour them on realtors’ websites.)
One character is breaking away from New Caanan: Wendy’s older brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), who attends a boarding school in Manhattan. He has normal teen misfortunes. He’ll get over them. He reads comic books – and the Russians. He is not trapped in his family’s social circle. He has a broader perspective on families. He’s able to generalize.
One worries more for the other children. Least for Wendy, perhaps, because her choices, while wrong, are deliberate. They’re experimental, not wanton or compulsive or knee-jerk. She even shoplifts experimentally (not desperately like her mother). It may not be nice that she carries on with both Carver boys at the same time. But, one perceives, she’s figuring out that she definitely likes one better than the other.
Ricci suggests all of this without saying much. Actors tend to specialize in either smart or dumb roles. Ricci can project intelligence or abject stupidity, as required. Wendy, in The Ice Storm, is shrewder than her deeds. Her face is bland but we can tell the gears are turning.
The other standouts are Hann-Byrd as Sandy, Sheridan as Mr. Carver, and Allen as Mrs. Hoover (the most reflective adult). Oh, and Allison Janney, who does a hilarious and unsettling turn as the hostess of a “key” party. (Men put their keys in a bowl; women draw keys; each woman goes home with the man whose key she has drawn.) Janney is New Caanan’s Ghislaine Maxwell, always smiling, coaxing would-be-sophisticates into becoming companions in degradation. None, afterward, can quite understand how he or she drifted into misery. They’re like their children, making the same mistakes, only they never learned to choose responsibly – as Wendy, in her one-step-backward-two-steps-forward manner, is doing. Perhaps the upheaval of the sixties permanently unmoored the grownups. I don’t know. The movie succeeds less as social commentary than as a rotation of vivid character sketches. Which is all right; that’s what ensemble dramas are for.
I should mention, also, that in the end, an ice storm purifies the air.
Mr. Hood – Kevin Kline, Cleese’s Wanda castmate – does the same in The Ice Storm (1997). Kline doesn’t quite play it for laughs, but the situation is amusing – especially when Mr. Hood goes downstairs and finds his teenage daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), fooling around with little Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood).
Wendy has put on a Nixon mask. (It’s 1973.)
Why are you here, Mr. Hood asks her.
Later, he tells his wife what he caught Wendy doing.
Why were YOU at the Carvers’, asks Mrs. Hood (Joan Allen).
Mr. Hood is taken aback. The marriage has gone so stale that he has forgotten to disguise his affair with Mrs. Carver (Sigourney Weaver).
(Mrs. Hood also has a vice: she shoplifts.)
The affair is stale, too. Mrs. Carver tells Mr. Hood that he’s boring. He is, but she’s cruel about it. She leaves him in her bedroom, gets in her car, and drives away.
Humiliating her husband and her lover – simultaneously, if possible – is how she gets her kicks.
Her son, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), a quiet, shy boy, also displays a touch of sadism. (It says something that he is one of the most likeable, or least despicable, characters.)
He blows up toys in the back yard.
Play with the whip instead, his mother tells him.
Mikey, Sandy’s brother, is a gifted student whose mind is in the clouds. He worries about molecules that drift through the air into people’s bodies.
He’s a chip off the old block. His father, Mr. Carver (Jamey Sheridan), a scientist, is like a planet with a huge irregular orbit. Kindly but distracted, he passes near his family once every few earth-decades.
The Carvers and Hoods live in New Caanan – an apt name, what with the regression of morals – on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Other suburban dramas have been filmed or located there: The Swimmer, Revolutionary Road, and Nicole Kidman’s Stepford Wives.
The scenery is as important as the story. Look at those houses!
(Nowadays, you can tour them on realtors’ websites.)
One character is breaking away from New Caanan: Wendy’s older brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), who attends a boarding school in Manhattan. He has normal teen misfortunes. He’ll get over them. He reads comic books – and the Russians. He is not trapped in his family’s social circle. He has a broader perspective on families. He’s able to generalize.
One worries more for the other children. Least for Wendy, perhaps, because her choices, while wrong, are deliberate. They’re experimental, not wanton or compulsive or knee-jerk. She even shoplifts experimentally (not desperately like her mother). It may not be nice that she carries on with both Carver boys at the same time. But, one perceives, she’s figuring out that she definitely likes one better than the other.
Ricci suggests all of this without saying much. Actors tend to specialize in either smart or dumb roles. Ricci can project intelligence or abject stupidity, as required. Wendy, in The Ice Storm, is shrewder than her deeds. Her face is bland but we can tell the gears are turning.
The other standouts are Hann-Byrd as Sandy, Sheridan as Mr. Carver, and Allen as Mrs. Hoover (the most reflective adult). Oh, and Allison Janney, who does a hilarious and unsettling turn as the hostess of a “key” party. (Men put their keys in a bowl; women draw keys; each woman goes home with the man whose key she has drawn.) Janney is New Caanan’s Ghislaine Maxwell, always smiling, coaxing would-be-sophisticates into becoming companions in degradation. None, afterward, can quite understand how he or she drifted into misery. They’re like their children, making the same mistakes, only they never learned to choose responsibly – as Wendy, in her one-step-backward-two-steps-forward manner, is doing. Perhaps the upheaval of the sixties permanently unmoored the grownups. I don’t know. The movie succeeds less as social commentary than as a rotation of vivid character sketches. Which is all right; that’s what ensemble dramas are for.
I should mention, also, that in the end, an ice storm purifies the air.