'Storm''s chilling genius makes it No. 1

Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci keep warm in Ang Lee's brilliant "The Ice Storm."

"The Ice Storm" could have been so bad so easily. It comes on as one of those family-falling-apart-over-a-weekend dramas, wherein our squirms of embarrassed recognition tend to substitute for cathartic shudders. It proceeds to mope and meander and provide no character development whatsoever. And it's the best film of the year.

Directed by Ang Lee ("Sense And Sensibility"), "The Ice Storm" is a series of heart-breakingly beautiful vignettes of one Connecticut family's winter of 1973 - several postcards from several edges. The father is caught up in a meaningless fling with a neighbor; the mother quietly traipses off into catatonic seclusion; the 14-year-old daughter's libido wanders about; and the stoner son is in love with a girl named Libitz.

That, in short, is as much in the way of conventional plotting as we get up until the film's very last minutes. Instead, we are left to observe - to spy on every painful detail of the pill-popping, shoplifting and clumsy sex until the sheer amount of information we received makes it impossible to stay impartial.

The film's gorgeously droll gimmick is to place it all against the titular mixture of rain, sleet and ice, a snapshot of nature's indecision. The setting is achingly perfect in its ultimate plasticity - does it stand for anything in particular? Should it? Meanwhile, trains stand frozen, rows of icicles line slippery suburban porches and every twig looks encased in glass; and tempting as it is to draw convenient parallels between this and the deep freeze falling over the relationships in the film, the beauty of the backdrop lies precisely in how self-sufficient it, in fact, remains.

It is difficult to talk about "The Ice Storm" without picking it apart into individual scenes, each one a litmus test of sorts: What will stick with you will tell more about you than the film. Will it be a troubled young boy balancing on a icy springboard above a dark empty pool? A woman curling up into a fetal position on a ridiculous waterbed after cold-heartedly destroying both a marriage and an affair? Two teen-agers concocting a brand of a new, improved bongwater?

REVIEW
	The Ice Storm At the Ann Arbor 1&2 4 stars

Ang Lee leaves the film open on every possible end, and the fact that it still holds together is nothing short of a miracle. What might help it is the genuine respect Lee seems to have for his flawed heroes. In its scenes of various preteen mischief, "The Ice Storm" is what "Kids" might have been, were it swept clean of director Larry Clark's leering sensibilities. On its "adult" side, the film looks past pet rocks and Astroturf into the confused, paranoid heart of the '70s.

Kevin Kline exudes ineffectiveness as the beleaguered husband; he is doing a more honest, less streamlined variation on his character from "The Big Chill." Sigourney Weaver and Joan Allen provide two sufficiently icy foils, but in the end, "The Ice Storm" belongs to the kids. Christina Ricci, whom we watched grow up from "Addams Family," gives a full-star performance here - she is a woman torn between two men, after all, and the fact that one of the men is still playing with his G.I. Joe, ends up only adding absurd poignancy. Elijah Wood, as a kid who might or might not be a science genius (we are given some hints attesting to that, each one weirder than the other), almost upsets the balance of "The Ice Storm" because we want to see more of him for most of the film.

And we do, in a quietly devastating coda that ties everyone's pain and confusion into one knot - the film breaks off immediately afterward, leaving us with David Bowie's "I Can't Read" over a scroll of credits. There is no lesson to be derived from "The Ice Storm," and that, strangely enough, is a part of its genius.

11-26-97