The Ice Storm . Newcity Chicago . 10-27-97

The Ice Storm

DIRECTED BY: Ang Lee

REVIEWED: 10-27-97

Ang Lee's chilly, exquisite portrait of two families in suburban New Canaan, Connecticut, 1973 is a triumph of mood over material, a work of intense texture and rewarding behavioral acuity. Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver are among the adults; the adolescents include Tobey Maguire, Elijah Wood, Adam Hann-Byrd, and in a marvel of a performance as a driven, disturbed, sexually precocious 14-year-old, Christina Ricci. The cinematography by Frederick Elmes and the music by Mychael Danna dazzles. Take one elegant, enigmatic shot for example: from the perspective of a commuter train reaching its stop-signed end of the line, Danna's score sprinkles bell-like gamelan music of great beauty as we see a row of middle-aged white men, hats clamped to heads, clutching briefcases, swaddled in identical tan Burberrys. The elegiac forward motion, the fantastic choice of music, the sudden register of the morbid plight of the men-haunting. Marvelous stuff, and certainly not to be typed as a "seventies backlash" picture. Lee and his screenwriter-producer James Schamus are after something much more mysterious and may have grasped it.

--Ray Pride

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Other Films by Ang Lee
Ride With the Devil
Sense and Sensibility

Film Vault Suggested Links
Grace of My Heart
Dancing at Lughnasa
Ulee's Gold

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