Word: storm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cleaver: dysfunctional families are "in" these days, and here to stay--at least as far as this fall's movie crop is concerned. Close on the heels of the high-powered but uneven A Thousand Acres, and preceding The House of Yes and the much-anticipated The Ice Storm, comes the The Myth of Fingerprints, the debut feature of writer/director Bart Freundlich...
...Moody's 1994 novel, is a time of profound unease--when '60s free love got to the suburbs, and the folks there knew they had to try it but didn't know how to enjoy it. Promiscuity became one more burden of middle-class life. And the climactic ice storm is nature's way of saying, Don't try this at home. "At first it comes down like water, really soft," says Lee, 42. "Suddenly it freezes and wraps everything. It adds weight to the objects, eventually causing them to shatter. It's a crystal world...
...elaborate, often suffocating behavioral codes that its inhabitants try desperately to obey--this is the milieu of all five of the Taiwanese director's films, from his Mandarin-language "Father Knows Best trilogy" (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) to Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. His characters' failure to achieve an artificial ideal makes the films both comedies of manners and bourgeois tragedies. Especially this one, thanks to a superb script by Lee's frequent collaborator James Schamus. When Janey joins Elena in her kitchen to help with the dishes, the hostess whispers a steely...
When the local hippie minister makes a mildly suggestive remark to Elena, she says, "I'm going to try hard not to understand the implications of that." That is the cardinal rule here: Don't ask, don't dwell. One of the chilliest moments in The Ice Storm comes in an edgy scene where Ben tells Elena, "I guess we're just on the verge of saying something--saying something to each other." Saying something harsh and truthful would be a breaking of the code, of the lies that sustain their marriage and keep it arid...
...pass draconian judgments on his sweet, sad characters. "My Oriental upbringing made me bring sympathy to them," he says. "It also gave me the fear of nature, fear and respect for something bigger than life, something unknown that you can't control." He could mean not just the ice storm in his delicately devastating film, but the wayward impulses that rage in every human heart...