Event

The Ice Storm

Its November 1973 in New Canaan, Connecticut and the lives of a wealthy family are quietly falling into peril. As the teenagers surreptitiously experiment with drugs and alcohol and the adults drift into mate-swapping, a dangerous blanket of freezing rain begins to cover the town.

Cannes Film Festival 1997 | Winner: Best Screenplay

Lees New Canaanites are largely adrift in their easy privilege and luxury, only coming together for a climactic key party during the titular visit from Mother Nature. And though Lee takes pleasure in detailing their dullness, disconnect, and shallow indulgences, he works with the uniformly excellent cast to bring these selfish creatures to vivid, haunted life. Chris Cabin, Slant Magazine

James Schamuss elegant screenplay, based on Rick Moodys slyer, more loquacious novel, favors clipped, short dialogue uttered in discrete, jewel-like scenes. Michael Koresky, Sundance Now

A well-observed and deftly performed examination of upper-middle-class emotional deep freeze Variety

The Ice Storm captures this place, this season, this garish and confused moment in history, with surgical precisionIts Lees sympathetic detachment that gives the movie its paradoxical power. Newsweek

The movie escapes so basic a reading because of Lee himself, an outsider (Lee did not arrive in the United States until 1978) who ably turned Ice Storm into a period piece that examines a significant change in the American way of life: when the barreling train of late-60s liberation met the brick wall of suburban, conservative adulthood, symbolized by Nixons face on the television screen and the hard lines of the suburban mod architecture awkwardly placed inside New England forests. Arthur Ryel-Lindsey