The Ice Storm

I watched the first half of The Ice Storm with the thought a little too close to the front of my mind that practically every review of Lymelife that I have read has described that film as a lesser (to one degree or another) version of the well-liked Ang Lee picture; and it was even fresher in my mind because I read a short review of Lymelife - which connected the two pictures - in the current (but not exactly new) issue of Paste while I was eating dinner a couple of nights ago. I just never got around to watching The Ice Storm until now, and I think that’s going to wind up being an unfortunate thing because it would have been easier to like it if I had not already seen Lymelife; and the slightly funny thing is that I didn’t think Lymelife was a great movie. I thought it was a good movie, and I think that The Ice Storm is a good movie, too; but it’s way more pretentious than Lymelife - and yes, Ang, I get the idea that you want us all to pay attention to the cracking ice and the bowl of keys. Cut and print, already.

I know that part of the problem is that these characters are all emotionally frigid and are meant to look and sound sort of like robots because the word ice is in the title, and it’s probably even a testament to the cast’s acting skills that they manage to come off that way; but I think it’s stretching the credibility of the suspension of disbelief to try to convince me that none of these characters is especially fired up about...well, about anything. An entire community that has ennui, all at once? It’s almost as though someone started a meth lab in Stepford. Is it the tab collars and sideburns? The Formica and Naugahyde? Could it just be that these characters hate the fact that their story takes place in the 1970s? (Replace Joan Allen with the winking Tilda Swinton from Orlando, and this might just be a magical kind of picture - David Lynch meets Woody Allen in the Bizarro version of Pleasantville.)

I also know that I’m getting awfully close to making the same kind of comment about this movie that Troy made about No Country For Old Men (which I thought was a remarkably good movie); to wit, whence such nihilism? Why is it so easy for me to like a movie as bleak as No Country For Old Men, and yet so hard for me to like something equally as bleak in The Ice Storm? Part of it, I’m quite sure, has to do with having read the book. I was practically finished with No Country For Old Men before I saw the movie (and was, in fact, so enamored of the movie that I went back and re-read the novel three more times in the next couple of months); but I have not (yet) read The Ice Storm, and so can’t bring to the movie the knowledge of what’s missing in the spaces between the scenes - which would be especially helpful here because of how much jump-cutting is employed. The effect is almost distracting, going from scene to scene to scene without taking the time to say all that much in any particular one of them; but I guess it’s not without an objective, which seems to be that they want you to get a really good idea of how much time and effort and money they spent on the art direction for this picture.

And it really does warm up in the second half - it’s just that the first half takes so long to get going that you almost want to give up on it. I almost wanted to give up on it, anyway. I noticed the same thing, though to a lesser extent, with Brokeback Mountain - and so am now quite leery of jumping into something like Lust, Caution. I don’t think I really want to imagine how long that one might take to warm up. In the end, though, I liked The Ice Storm - even if I liked it less than I might have if I had seen it closer to when it actually came out. That may not be especially fair, but I don’t get paid to write about movies, so I can’t just run out and see all the new ones at the drop of a hat.