Ice Storm

It's November 1973 in a USA where nothing seem to be right. Vietnam and Watergate has put values and morals into turmoil. Male and female throw cautious glances at each other, insecure in a a new world as far as sexual revolutions and feminism goes. In a house in New Canaan, Connecticut gathers mother and father Hood and their two teenage children for the annual Thanksgiving celebrations. Outside a storm is blowing up, but the silence around the Hoods' abundant table-spread is just as cold.
Lee's decision to tackle the seventies, the Nixon years and the sexual revolution is a brave one. Although all of his films deal with altering societies and the effect of this in the family structures, the first three was largely based on the Chinese culture he grew up in, and the fourth, ”Sense and Sensibility”, took place in nineteenth-century England, a period probably as diffuse to the audience as to Lee himself. ”The Ice Storm”, however, is the big challenge, as many Americans still have the era in fresh memory, while Lee himself had to put faith in research based on phenomenons like the book ”I'm OK, You're OK”, the documentary serial ”An American Family” and other TV shows of the seventies.
The elaborate recreation of early American 1970's, with TV coffee pots, huge collars and guacamole-green kitchens is impeccable in every tiny detail. This does not give any feeling of nostalgia, however, just emptyness.
The cinematographer of ”The Ice Storm” is Frederick Elwes ”(Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Eraserhead” and ”Night on Earth)” who gives the images a truly eerie quality. Lee's narration is a subdued one, balancing between comedy and tragedy without ever having to raise his voice. The story is told from the viewpoint of the calm in the eye of the storm and has two centres in two words, these are according to Lee the epitomes of this period in American history. The first word is adolescence.
Not just the children, speaks Lee, but also the parents. They are growing up too. The often act more than teenagers than the children themselves do. The other word is embarrassment. Americans in the seventies, according to Lee, seems uncomfortable and embarrassed, for their fumbling experiments with sex and drugs as well as the fact that their
Katarina Wallentin