One Paragraph Movie Review: The Ice Storm

Two hundred and forty-eighth film: The Ice Storm, a movie made in 1997, set in 1973, and burdened with a growing sense of ick and an incredible cast. Set against an increasingly frozen Thanksgiving backdrop, the whole two hours is devoted to watching rich American suburbanites prioritise the sex-positive, light-drug-experimenting, switched on performative zeitgeist over normal, communicative, honest relationships. Most of the problems these people have are shallow and self-inflicted and when, near the film’s peak, a legitimate and actual problem arises, it feels like it’s just plonked on the pile on top of the others. Christina Ricci is more detached here as a bored teenager than she was as Wednesday Addams, and Sigourney Weaver has all the warmth of a stalled train. This thing makes me want very much to put on a warm coat and walk through a grove of freshly-icicled trees but it does NOT make me want to go to a keys-in-the-bowl swinger party in a split-level mansion. Hmmm. Two and a half rubber Nixon masks out of five.