CINEMA: LEFT OUT IN THE COLD

Forget the dictates of retrochic: the typical ’70s family was not the Brady Bunch. It might have been closer to the Hoods and the Carvers, neighboring clans in New Canaan, Conn., who make up one big unhappy family in The Ice Storm. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is having a fruitless tryst with Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), while Ben’s wife Elena (Joan Allen) screams silently, so as not to wake the kids, and Janey’s husband Jim (Jamey Sheridan) has so little impact on his brood that when he calls out a cheery, “I’m back,” his son Mikey (Elijah Wood) replies, “You were gone?”

Playtime for the kids, on this Thanksgiving weekend of 1973, means sexual one-upmanship. Precocious Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) insists on wearing a Nixon mask during foreplay with Mikey Carver and goads his shy younger brother Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd) into a game of mutual exhibitionism. Wendy’s brother Paul (Tobey Maguire) goes to a Manhattan party where, once again, a pretty girl treats him as just a friend. For the adults the big social event is a Key Party. The men drop their car keys into a bowl, the women blindly pick them out, and new sexual partnerships are formed–a surer route to public embarrassment than to private ecstasy. The omens are clear: the founderings of all these nice people will lead to trouble. A child must be sacrificed; men must sob at their loss. The Ice Storm, says Ang Lee, director of this daring epic in miniature, is “a disaster movie. Except the disaster hits home.”

The ’70s, in Rick Moody’s 1994 novel, is a time of profound unease–when ’60s free love got to the suburbs, and the folks there knew they had to try it but didn’t know how to enjoy it. Promiscuity became one more burden of middle-class life. And the climactic ice storm is nature’s way of saying, Don’t try this at home. “At first it comes down like water, really soft,” says Lee, 42. “Suddenly it freezes and wraps everything. It adds weight to the objects, eventually causing them to shatter. It’s a crystal world.”

A world with elaborate, often suffocating behavioral codes that its inhabitants try desperately to obey–this is the milieu of all five of the Taiwanese director’s films, from his Mandarin-language “Father Knows Best trilogy” (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) to Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. His characters’ failure to achieve an artificial ideal makes the films both comedies of manners and bourgeois tragedies. Especially this one, thanks to a superb script by Lee’s frequent collaborator James Schamus. When Janey joins Elena in her kitchen to help with the dishes, the hostess whispers a steely, “Don’t touch them!” It is Elena’s amusingly fierce marking of her turf; it is also a socially acceptable way for her to bark at her husband’s mistress and uncork her hatred of her life.

“This movie is about uncomfortableness,” Lee says. “Whatever you do is somehow wrong. So the actors could not feel self-assured about their performing. It’s not about performing; it’s about people being observed in an uncomfortable situation.” The viewer should feel the same way. A squirming sympathy is the only proper reaction to the clumsiness of the parents’ attempts to connect with their kids, like Ben’s solemn advice to his son on masturbation (“Don’t do it in the shower”). Yet the film’s lesson is that, God help us and them, we are our parents. The kids and their folks share all kinds of little sins, from shoplifting to casual sex to peeking in a neighbor’s medicine cabinet. Home, the film says, is a school where we mostly learn bad habits.

When the local hippie minister makes a mildly suggestive remark to Elena, she says, “I’m going to try hard not to understand the implications of that.” That is the cardinal rule here: Don’t ask, don’t dwell. One of the chilliest moments in The Ice Storm comes in an edgy scene where Ben tells Elena, “I guess we’re just on the verge of saying something–saying something to each other.” Saying something harsh and truthful would be a breaking of the code, of the lies that sustain their marriage and keep it arid.

Lee’s exquisitely watchful face may suggest a softness of temperament. Don’t be fooled: he knows what he wants. “I like to communicate in a civilized way, if my English can accommodate it,” says Lee, who came to the U.S. for college in 1978 and has lived here ever since. “Sometimes my English is a little brutal. But that’s all right. I get understood.”

The grace of an Ang Lee film is in his avoidance of the gaucheries his characters cannot escape. He calls this “a costume drama,” but doesn’t push the period. “I haven’t seen the ’70s treated realistically. Most films mock the ’70s. But it’s both period and very fresh in our memory. That ambiguity fascinated me.”

And of course Lee will not pass draconian judgments on his sweet, sad characters. “My Oriental upbringing made me bring sympathy to them,” he says. “It also gave me the fear of nature, fear and respect for something bigger than life, something unknown that you can’t control.” He could mean not just the ice storm in his delicately devastating film, but the wayward impulses that rage in every human heart.

–Reported by William Tynan/New York