Reviews

This film is a masterpiece. It is an ambitious work the scope of which is breathtaking. A web of adults and children in which the dysfunctions of the adults are reflected in the tender probings of their kids. Larger contexts include suburbia, the Nixon-Vietnam political era, and the natural world of the ice storm. The movie unfolds with a beautiful tempo, like a sunrise or an unexpected flower. It is nearly impossible to predict which story line will be handled when, but the intoxicating rush of understated revelatory moments paralyzes any interest in suspense. The acting is superb. Kevin Kline's minimalist nervous breakdown and the melting of Joan Allen's spiritual deep-freeze are enormously pleasurable to watch. The young actors in the movie are almost eerily spectacular. Their acting, especially that of the two brothers and of Ricci, has a luminosity that is as transcendent as any performances I've ever viewed. Lee's direction is sensuous, understated, and loving. An entire world is being portrayed. A small door opened into a universe. While watching it, I was struck by its similarity to American Beauty. Both movies explore the myth of the American Family in decay in a suburban context, and both show the reflections of the parental narcissism in their children's' despair. But there is something about Ice Storm that makes it much more powerful than American Beauty. Perhaps it's the depth of the acting, although the acting in Beauty was hardly second-rate. Maybe its the distance of the era -- an added touch of nostalgia for the 70's, that adds an extra layer to the movie that is absent to the contemporary-minded American Beauty. I think what it is is a matter of the social context. American Beauty, although wonderful, is relatively cliché. We are familiar with its suburban ennui, with an older man's crush on a cheerleader, even with the wise child and his troubled father next door. There's something about the dysfunction in American Beauty that isn't earned the way it is in Ice Storm. Of course, this comes back to Rick Moody, the author of the novel the movie is based on. There is something of the novelist's eye to the Ice Storm. Some Shakespearian sense of intergenerational awe and of the cycles of the natural and social worlds. American Beauty lacks that. It's more of a comic book, more of a script brought to life by a stage-savvy director and some clever acting. Ice Storm is deeper. Much deeper. It's this gravity, I think, that holds the actors in its pull and allows them to transcend themselves. In my opinion truly one of the greatest American movies of the late 20th century.

I do not agree with the majority that the filmmaker intended the protagonist's stay at the house to be a creative hallucination. I think that there are enough narrative details to work out the whole thing. My view is that the girl who appears at the house -- Julie -- is the publisher's daughter, and that the girl who appears at the end of the movie in the publisher's office -- Julia -- is the child that he had with Julie (and therefore his daughter/ granddaughter). In other words, the publisher raped his daughter Julie, and the child they had is Julia. I took the point of the final sequence to be the writer's noting the similarity between mother and child.

Julie displays classic symptoms of having been sexually abused as a child by her father. First, she is a nymphomaniac with a penchant for older men (she is repeating the traumatic event). Second, she experiences a complete fugue when she hysterically identifies the protagonist as her mother and fears that she had abandoned her (the way her real mother abandoned her and allowed her to be raped by her father.) Third, Julie makes numerous references to the sexually predatory nature of her father: "He's the king of the orgies"; "you're his latest conquest"; and her introducing one of her older lovers to Marcel as "her father." Fourth, the murder of the waiter is what she has wanted to do to her father (and to all men), and it occurs when she has cast the writer as her mother and therefore returned to the dynamics of her rape.

Further bits of narrative emerge when, at their dinner, Julie tells the writer that her first sexual experience was at 13. I think this experience was her rape by the publisher. It's not stated how old Julie is, but, assuming she's in her mid-twenties, the girl Julia at the end could certainly be her daughter if she had her at 13. I think that Marcel's daughter's stating nervously that Julie's mother's death was an "accident" suggests that, distraught over the publisher's rape of her daughter, she killed herself. The large stomach scar is the Cesarean section by which the incestuous child Julia was born.

The novel that the protagonist writes is the story of this incestuous rape. The detective writer has found her biggest mystery yet -- a family mystery, and her publisher is the villain. This is why he tries to undermine her confidence about the book and suggests that it shouldn't be published. If it were, then the story of his incestuous villainy would be known.

The way the protagonist smiles so warmly at Julia when she sees her at the office is meant to display her warmly realizing how she resembles her mother Julie in some ways (although much younger and not yet sexualized.) And the final scene of the waving is meant to further identify the mother with her child.

In this way, the movie employs the same family secret as "Chinatown."