Critics reviews

Lee's 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.

James Schamus's elegant screenplay, based on Rick Moody's slyer, more loquacious novel, favors clipped, short dialogue uttered in discrete, jewel-like scenes.

It's possible to view the characters in The Ice Storm as a bunch of sinners and to look at what happens to them as well-deserved punishment. It's also possible to see The Ice Storm as an indictment of suburban hypocrisy and the sexual revolution. But this is not a morality tale or a period piece. It's about what it takes to live in a world where moral authority has collapsed.

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 Nixon's face on the television screen and the hard lines of the suburban mod architecture awkwardly placed inside New England forests.

I can't deny director Ang Lee?s sensitivity with actors or the fine cast strutting its stuff (including Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, and Sigourney Weaver); some of the period details are fun, and Lee offers some nicely observed moments. But the tragic and highly "symbolic" death toward the end, which is supposed to illustrate the sins of the parents being visited upon their children, barely resonates at all, because most of the insights are strictly incidental. The film elicits guilty, lascivious chuckles, not analysis.