Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
poignant, beautifully shot and moving,, 19 Dec 2003
This is a detailed trip through middle-class confusion in 1970s Connecticut, beautifully adapted from Rick Moody's highly-regarded novel.
Kevin Kline is Ben Hood, the father who is trying but doesn't have a clue, like all around him in an America that has broken morally and spiritually adrift. His carefully coiffed wife Elena (Allen) looks like a Stepford robot but is getting itchy for some liberated self-realisation. His neighbour Janey (Weaver) is the swinger next door who makes her waterbed freely available to him while denying him any warmth that may lurk beneath her cold, brittle indifference.Simultaneously, Ben and Elena's teenaged son (Tobey Maguire), en route from prep school for the Thanksgiving holiday, is having a Holden Caulfield weekend and pubescent daughter (Ricci) is playing "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" with the anxious, oddball boys next door (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd). Lee's vision of an emotionally drained suburban America hopelessly mired in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal and ineffectually coping with wife-swapping and barbiturates, confirms the 70s as the most excruciating style decade of the century, the totally tragic duds emblematic of the mass inability to get a grip. The film scores insights both in sharply observed social satire and poignantly universal details of sexual longing in the interwoven tales of parental mid-life crises and teen angst. But Lee's most impressive achievement is his almost imperceptible shift from sex farce to achingly funny youth drama to profound tragedy and despair as the approaching winter freeze of the title mirrors the family's emotional chill and the devastation it brings. The dazzling ensemble perfectly captures every nuance in one of the finest acting showcases you could hope for. Well worth seeing.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cold and stark, 1 Jan 2006
I, personally, was not alive in 1973. But the immensely underrated Ang Lee gives a glimpse into the 1970s suburbia when society went through a dramatic shift. A good thing? Don't be so sure. Lee strips away the illusions to reveal the loneliness and coldness in the wake of the sexual revolution.
The Carvers and the Hoods live next door to each other in an affluent suburban neighborhood. On the surface, all is well. But self-absorbed Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is having an affair with the icy Janie Carver (Sigourney Weaver). Similarly, his precocious daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) is "experimenting" with Janey's sons, the spacey Mikey (Elijah Wood). To make things worse, Ben's wife Elena (Joan Allen) is experiencing a bit of a crisis herself -- she suspects her husband is cheating on her, and she longs for the freedom and lack of care she had before her marriage.
After Ben finds Wendy and Mikey in a compromising position with a Nixon mask, and Elena clues in about Janey, the parents venture to what turns out to be a wife-swapping key party (the women take men's car keys out of a bowl and go home with covers New Canaan, their relationships will reach boiling point... and a tragedy will unfold.
I don't know how common these attitudes were in the 1970s, but undoubtedly they were a lot more common than people would like to remember. Such things as key parties seem almost alien now. Tobey Maguire's Paul Hood serves a vital function in this movie -- he's very normal, not into any sort of transitional weirdness (except pot smoking) and so can serve as an alter ego for the viewers.
Lee did a good job not just with the exquisite direction and the camerawork. He also doesn't overemphasize the sudden shifts in what was allowed and what wasn't -- in one scene, the adults calmly discuss watching "Deep Throat." As they speak, there's the nervous awareness that it was unacceptable for upper-middle-class suburbanite not long ago. They have drugs, free love, self-seeking... and they don't have the slightest clue what to do with it.
Lee overdoes it a little with the ice metaphors. The dead leaves and trees were a lot better. But he does do an expert job showing why loveless sex and distant families will only leave a person lonely. The families here talk a lot, but they don't speak. Even a simple question like "How's school?" or "What are you doing?" is enough to weird out the kids -- that's how far they are from their parents. Wood's only statement in the "making of" sums this up: "The parenting is just... it's all WHACKED!"
He tempers all this heavy stuff with humor, such as Janey coldly telling Ben that she doesn't need "another husband" prattling golf stories at her, or Mikey's comical confusion when Wendy offers to get intimate while wearing a Nixon mask. There are a lot of "seventies" things sprinkled through the movie, from the makeup to the toe socks (toe socks?), the TV shows, the hair, the clothes (Weaver's zippered jumpsuit, for example). But Lee doesn't really smack you in the face with it.
Kevin Kline is as good a serious actor as he is a comic one. When someone leers that he wishes people had brought their young daughters to the key party, Kline's expression is worth a thousand words. Weaver is always outstanding as a very cold woman who still has some affection for her kids; Allen is excellent as a woman whose feelings are bubbling past her icy exterior. Ricci mixes sophistication and vulnerability as the Nixon-obsessed Wendy. And Wood gives off a sort of ethereal feel as the spacey but sweet Mikey, a boy obsessed by molecules.
This is far from a feel-good movie, but it gives some undefined views into human nature, what is good for us and what isn't. Ang Lee took what could have been a disaster, and made it as cold and beautiful as an ice storm.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic!!, 23 May 2003
By A Customer
The first time I watched this masterpiece I was reduced to tears by the brutal and sudden ending. Its story is testament to the painful secrets a family can conceal and this is summed up perfectly in the final unspoken moments.The acting is superb and is complimented by the wonderful frozen, icey imagery used throughout. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys films which tackle the underbelly of American Surburbia (ie American Beauty) but in a more subtle way, which in turn makes it all the more powerful. This film was not acknowledged enough!
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