Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
In the weekend after thanksgiving 1973 the Hood family is skidding out of control. Then an ice storm hits, the worst in a century.
Ang Lee's The Ice Storm is a meticulous, devastating portrait of 1970s suburban anomie. The ensemble acting — Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire — is uniformly exceptional, with Allen's repressed housewife a particular standout. Frederick Elmes's cinematography is stunning, rendering the Connecticut ice storm as a literal and metaphorical freeze of American family life. The plot's slow-burn, multi-threaded structure is precise and purposeful, culminating in a genuinely shattering ending that earns its emotional weight. Novelty is solid but not singular — the suburban-malaise drama has predecessors — though the period specificity, tonal restraint, and literary fidelity give it a distinctive texture. Held back slightly from the highest tier only because its thematic territory (suburban dysfunction, sexual liberation's hollowness) had been charted before.