Kevin Kline and Joan Allen in The Ice Storm.
Taiwanese director Ang Lee has received Best Foreign Film Oscar nominations for The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman . He also garnered an Oscar nod for his first English language feature, Sense and Sensibility . Now there's Oscar buzz surrounding his new film, The Ice Storm .
Its 1973 and the sexual revolution is making its belated arrival in the affluent New England suburb of New Canaan. Free love may have been old news to most of the country but to the Hoods and the Carvers, it's new, radical and baffling. Things come to a head for this ivory tower community during the Thanksgiving weekend when the worst ice storm in thirty years hits the coast. Ang Lee's film adaptation of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm uses a natural phenomena to freeze a moment in time in order to examine the changing dynamics of American life. In his Taiwanese films The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman , Lee looked at the disintegration of the traditional Chinese family structure and found something hopeful in what replaced it. In The Ice Storm, he uses the turmoil of the sixties and seventies as the backdrop for his tale of chaos in the suburbs. The parents in this film were all married during the Eisenhower years and the values of that era are now being challenged. Watergate reveals that even presidents lie. Vietnam suggests that you might not be able to win a war. Books tell them to shift their focus from the family to the self. And pop culture pushes free love and rebellion.
