The Ice Storm (1997)

With both Thanksgiving and an ice storm approaching their early 70s Connecticut town, the “Hood” and “Carver” families are congregating for their celebrations in which you sense you might actually be safer if you were the turkey. We first meet the former family where dad “Ben” (Kevin Kline) is pretty much only going through the motions in his marriage to “Elena” (Joan Chen). Their loved up teenage son “Paul” (Tobey Maguire) has arrived from college in New York, and then there is daughter “Wendy” (Christina Ricci). The latter lot appear just as messy as “Jim” (Jamey Sheridan) and “Janey” (Sigourney Weaver) have their two kids “Mikey” (Elijah Wood) and “Sandy” (Adam Hann-Byrd) and both are replete with all the usual familial dysfunction you’d expect from small town America (or anywhere else). What we learn fairly swiftly is that “Ben” is having a long-term affair with “Janey”; “Wendy” is engaged in something embryonic with “Mikey” - to the chagrin of “Sandy” and with tempers raising as exponentially as the temperatures outside are dropping, things begin to come to a long-awaited head. Though the scenarios are somewhat exaggerated here, this is one of the best character studies I’ve seen on screen as it deals with adult issues of ennui, betrayal and tragedy, but also of adolescence and growing up - and virtually all of that is done with as little sentiment as possible. There’s sex, lust, infatuation on display here - but is there actually any love? Or respect? Is age in any way an arbiter of maturity, or of being “grown up”? Kline, Chen and Weaver offer us quite a solid masterclass on just how to portray characters with virtually no self-awareness, nor sense of anything except themselves. Hypocrisy rules amidst a “do as I say not as I do” mentality that is best exemplified by “Ben” and his rapport with the sexually adventurous “Wendy” and by “Elena” as her patience finally begins to evaporate. Meantime, a solid series of efforts from the younger cast remind us all of the joys and pitfalls of puberty and the years immediately following our own sexual awakening. The whole thing is written with toxicity in mind, and with the external photography of this equally chilling environmental phenomena taking hold outside their centrally heated igloos, there develops a distinctly claustrophobic feel to the whole thing. Hopefully, most family life won’t be like this…!?