The Ice Storm

 

Director Ang Lee on the set

Lee confers with actress Sigourney Weaver

Ang Lee directing a scene

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ICE STORM         B                                                                                                        USA  (112 mi)  1997  d: Ang Lee

In issue 141 of the Fantastic Four, published in November, 1973, Reed Richards had to use his anti-matter weapon on his own son, who Aannihilus has turned into the Human Atom Bomb.  It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four, because they weren’t like other superheroes. They were more like a family.  And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other without even knowing it.  That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal anti-matter.  Your family is the void you emerge from, and the place you return to when you die.  And that’s the paradox — the closer you're drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go.                                                                                                         —Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire)

Despite all the accolades for this film, set in the early 70’s, and all the awards (though shut out by the Oscars), with some proclaiming it “the best American film of the 90’s” (The Ice Storm: Baby, It's Cold Outside | Current), you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of more wretchedly miserable people, the adults especially, who in nearly every single scene are exposed for the unlimited reach of their moral hypocrisy, mirroring the lies and criminal corruption within the Nixon administration, setting a dubious standard for the insufferable, ethical malaise sweeping the entire country.  Throughout this grim examination of East coast suburbia, a study of what passes for social interactions in a landscape of wealth and extravagance, there is nothing resembling an actual conversation, as people only pay lip service to the idea of listening, instead it is clear they are simply bored with the emptiness that wealth has brought them.  The parents are so self-absorbed that the term responsibility is a dirty word, as kids are largely left on their own, like lambs led to the slaughter, having little opportunity to be healthy and happy, as this is a film that exposes just how fucked up people are, and if there are any doubts about the effects of passing hedonistic values onto the next generation, look at what they’ve become as voters in the political landscape of today.  Evidently, like the adults in this picture, all the warning signs of danger have been ignored, leading us straight into the dumpster era of sadistic intolerance, malignant narcissism, and abhorrent self-centeredness that is Trump and his minions.  While Tobey Maguire does a lovely contemplative introductory narration, where the world of Marvel comic books, specifically the combined superpowers of The Fantastic Four, serves as inspiration for a dysfunctional family unit, this plays out more like a horror film, where even after all these years it’s still hard to watch.  Like Ang Lee’s previous film, Sense and Sensibility (1995), this explores the uneasy family dynamic through an observational lens, though instead of shooting through the formal prism of 19th century Jane Austin, this is a modern adaptation of Rick Moody’s acclaimed 1994 novel, with a meticulous script by James Schamus that omits most of the provocative sex from the book, toning it down considerably, studying two troubled affluent families in suburban Connecticut during the Nixon Watergate hearings of 1973, where it all comes to a head during a flash wintry blizzard that sends chilling danger signs over a Thanksgiving weekend that are completely ignored.  While there are beautiful images captured by cinematographer Frederick Elmes and terrific use of flutes and gamelan bells in the Mychael Danna soundtrack, as well as an excellent performance by Christina Ricci playing a disturbed, sexually precocious 14-year old, this is a truly uninspiring and obnoxiously empty film about the nuclear family in decay, an era of skyrocketing divorce rates, with kids coming to the realization that their parents may not end up together.  Filled with empty people having little or nothing of significance to say, this is another one of those adults behaving badly films, where there is no hint of redemption, yet to Lee’s credit, he keeps the mysteries unexplained, with Lee finding his own voice nearly a decade later with the emotionally intense Brokeback Mountain (2005), a towering work that surpasses this in every respect.   

The film was distributed through Fox (also releasing a series of Fantastic Four films), owned by Rupert Murdoch, known for espousing conservative values on his television network, yet was largely viewed as an independent film, perhaps hoping to entice more progressive viewers, but the film never generated money at the box office, and lost more than $10 million dollars.  Lee had an affinity for Susan and Alan Raymond’s 12-hour television documentary An American Family, released in 1973, which chronicles the flamboyant dysfunction and disintegration of a family, an early example of reality TV that aired on public television, where the raw honesty captured the public’s imagination, described by Dennis Lim in The New York Times ("Reality-TV Originals, in Drama's Lens") as a “counterculture hangover.”  Lee transformed that California locale to an upper class setting on the East coast, where the torments of two suburban families were a reflection of a longstanding disconnect that had been brewing under the surface for years, leaving strangers living together who were clearly at odds with each other.  A portrait of the American Dream in distress and on life support, suburban respectability is all a mirage, but this pales in comparison to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) or David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET (1986), and re-explored later in Todd Fields’ Little Children (2006), where optimism has been replaced by a deep-seeded cynicism that infects the lives of ordinary citizens who are lost and simply can’t find their way.  While the adults are utterly despicable, their lives seemingly beyond repair, it’s the kids that offer some semblance of hope, but the loveless example that has been set for them is filled with traps and dead ends, where it’s only a matter of time before they start resembling their parents, and the Sisyphean cycle starts all over again.  Each generation seems to have a built-in resentment for the next, unable to adapt to the rapid cultural changes and adjustments that come so much easier for their kids, as the core of the parent’s existence is suddenly obsolete.  Lee sets the scene in a wintry landscape with bare trees, dead leaves, patches of snow on the ground, and crisp wintry air, creating an apt tone for a film about sexual detachment and alienation within the family, with the dialogue filled with irony and bitterness, where there’s practically no communication at all.  Each scene is fairly short, the conversation brief, giving the film an abrupt nature, where it’s all about what’s not being said.  With a terrific cast, told almost entirely in a flashback, the film begins and ends with Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire) on a commuter train from Manhattan to New Canaan, Connecticut, where he gets philosophical in a voice-over narration as he reads a Fantastic Four superhero comic book, where he makes a stunning realization, “The more power they had, the more suffering they could inflict on each other without even noticing it.”  This becomes the overall theme of the film, a subversive message about unintentionally undermining your own family, told in an absurdist manner, where the entire film may be viewed as a sober reflection on the loss of innocence, though another chilly, repressed emotions film it recalls is the rarely discussed, understated yet emotionally devastating Robert Redford film Ordinary People (1980), which actually won an Academy Award for Best Picture before falling into obscurity.

Paul is later seen in a snazzy boarding school discussing the existentialism of Dostoyevsky, where he dreams of female classmate Libbets Casey (Katie Holmes in her film debut), the object of his desires, where he foolishly, though he thinks flirtatiously, recommends that she read The Idiot.  Kevin Kline and Joan Allen play his clueless parents, Ben and Elena Hood, while Christina Ricci plays his smart-alecky and sexually adventurous younger sister Wendy who enjoys sticking it to her parents and may be the unsung star of the show.  In something of a mirror image, Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver play the Hood’s best friends and neighbors Jim and Janey Carver, leading parallel lives with two rather screwed up boys, molecule-obsessed Mikey and toy mutilator Sandy, played by Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd.  Both families paint the picture-perfect portrait of the ideal American suburban family, yet the future is filled with a restless anxiety, where an underlying sense of gloom permeates everything.  While Ben Hood pretends to be looking forward to spending Thanksgiving weekend with his children, at least that’s what he tells them, he’s instead distracted by an obsessional sexual affair with Janey Carver, something his wife Elena senses, but Ben wholeheartedly denies, while their children are actively engaged in their own clandestine sexual pursuits.  For example, Wendy meets Mikey at an abandoned swimming pool filled with dead leaves, where they share a kiss, but not before she removes the chewing gum from her mouth.  When Jim Carver returns from a business trip to Houston, announcing ”Hey guys, I’m back,” his older son makes the astute observation, “You were gone?”  Meanwhile Wendy also plays sexual peekaboo with Sandy (“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours), whose preferred activity is blowing up things, where he actually mouths the words “I love you,’” to which she responds, “Are you drunk?”  But she can also be seen donning a Nixon mask to wear when she and Mikey are about to have sex in the basement, only to be caught red-handed by her sanctimonious father who reads Mikey the riot act, blaming him for everything while absolving his daughter from all sins (although she was the initiator), absurdly seen carrying her silently through the wet and muddy woods on their return home as she complained of cold feet.  Ben isn’t exactly perceived as Don Juan by his acid-tongued, ice princess partner in crime Janey, shushing him after sex when he drones on endlessly about golf, reminding him, “You’re boring me.  I already have a husband.”  In another instance, just as they’re about to get undressed, she’s apparently heard enough of his incessant blabbering, inexplicably leaving without a word, driving away in her car, leaving him naked and alone in her house.  Ben may be the ineffective and guilt-ridden father, but Janey Carver is literally sleepwalking through her marriage.  The ambiguity of some of these mixed messages may leave some to question the pervasive theme, wondering whether it belongs to progressive aesthetics or more regressive “family values” that demand punishment for society’s moral transgressions, as this is the conservative backlash from the liberating spirit of the 60’s Summer of Love, yet this austere, emotionally inert depiction of family dysfunction is largely overshadowed by the theatrical fireworks of the great American playwrights, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller.             

In the early 70’s, the ideals of the 60’s, from social change, political disenchantment, to casual sex, finally reached the mainstream, but society remained paralyzed from the lingering effects of lost hopes that died with the stream of 60’s political assassinations.  The film effectively dissects the inept and failed patriarchy at the heart of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture, complete with stereo phonographs, boxed TV sets, gaudy, polyester leisure suits, hairstyles that require tons of hairspray, water beds, and modernist homes with shag carpets and wall-sized windows overlooking the woods outdoors.  But drugs and casual sex were the most prominent escape routes before the AIDS epidemic put a halt to much of that, still on the last vestiges of the 60’s sexual revolution, when the porn film DEEP THROAT (1972) became a unique and popular success, with people testing the boundaries of their structured upbringing.  Alcohol was served at every social gathering, and there was rarely an adult seen without a drink or a cigarette in their hand, usually both, but sex in this film is portrayed as a grotesque misadventure, the ultimate expression of the failure to communicate.  The Watergate scandal that saturates the airwaves is about to bring down a crumbling presidency, the extremely unpopular Vietnam War rages on, and disillusionment with authority pervades the country and is felt in every nook and cranny.  Nixon’s dishonesty is echoed by Ben Hood’s dishonesty, yet the detached nature of the film is everpresent, exposing the contradictions of suburban life, a pit of cultural confusion and lost souls, yet nothing is more emotionally demoralizing than the steamrolling effect from a swinging seventies, neighborhood wife-swapping party, where consenting adults place their car keys in a bowl when they arrive and go home at the end with the person from the opposite sex who selects their keys.  In this film the expression “Love the one you’re with” becomes subverted into anyone other than who you’re with.  Illusion and reality are put to the test and fail miserably, as the results are never what you expect, yet belief in the dream is what led you to place your keys in the bowl in the first place.  Everyone hopes for something better, never thinking that things could actually get much worse.  Paul has his own misadventure in the city, where things never live up to the dream, yet the haunting effects of the weather outside sends warning signs and danger signals that are routinely ignored, as a frozen rain storm suddenly coats every surface in a glaze of ice, creating treacherous conditions, with tree branches and power lines falling under the weight of the ice, making roads impassable while cutting off electricity, where entire communities are immobilized.  Despite attempts to navigate the icy terrain, coldness and cynicism have been injected into the landscape in equal measures, as people are left isolated, cut off from all that they find familiar, discovering a frozen world instead, where one catastrophe after another leads to horrific and disastrous results, where in the end nothing is celebrated except disillusionment.  Part satire, part psychological drama, and part tragedy, Lee has taken what is essentially a fragmentary piece of fiction and turns it into a coherent and vividly recognizable period piece that attempts to convey emotional honesty and authenticity, but continually keeps viewers at a healthy distance.   

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Spotlight

Original Boston Globe Spotlight team of Michael Rezendes, Ben Bradlee Jr., Sacha Pfeiffer, Walter Robinson, Martin Baron and Matt Carroll are seen at the film premiere

SPOTLIGHT              B+                  

USA  (128 mi)  2015  d:  Tom McCarthy                   Official Site

This strikes me as an essential story for a local paper.

—Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber)

While one of the leading candidates for the Academy’s pick for Best Picture, this is a fairly conventional, relatively mainstream film that prides itself for its social significance, and while largely understated throughout, without any big dramatic moments, it’s the kind of film that tends to gain momentum heading into Oscar season with people congratulating themselves for endorsing this picture, as if that eases their conscience and somehow makes them feel like they’re better people.  Much like viewers of Selma (2015) or Straight Outta Compton (2015), simply attending a film is often seen as a substitute for actual commitment to progressive social values, as if that act alone is working towards building better race relations.  The topic of discussion is the intensive 2001 Boston Globe journalistic investigation of a massive child sex abuse scandal by multiple Catholic priests along with a systemic cover-up of these crimes by the local Church hierarchy, including the Bishop, who knew what was happening all along but did little to protect the young and the innocent from these known sexual predators.   Jumping right into the action, the film opens with an earlier scene from the 90’s where a boy and his abusing priest are seen gathered with the child’s parents at a police station, where no charges are filed as the Bishop can be seen consoling the family before escorting the priest into an awaiting car that speeds away where the offending priest will simply be relocated anonymously to another parish.  Shown with little fanfare, it’s all swept under the rug in the blink of an eye with few traces left behind.  Jump ahead to early 2001, where newspapers are under threat from the Internet which is already cutting into their readership and classified ads, as they’re bringing in a new editor at the Boston Globe with an established reputation for making cuts, where the newspaper business itself is under fire, as evidenced by a giant AOL billboard seen just outside the Globe offices.   

Quickly introducing the featured players, they include new editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), a straightlaced outsider arriving from Miami who’s curiously reading The Curse of the Bambino written by a Globe sports writer to familiarize himself with Boston, while the rest are all locals, including deputy editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), whose father was the executive editor of The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal of the 1970’s, and the Spotlight team, a group of three writers working in the basement who can devote more time to investigating a series of stories that may be researched for months before a single article is printed.  The Spotlight editor is Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), while his three reporters are Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Marty Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James).  All are seen in a way we haven’t seen before, as Keaton has literally resurrected his career after the success of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), while Ruffalo is more hyper, a kind of obsessed, detail-oriented guy who is on the job literally every second that he’s awake, who doesn’t have time to “decorate” his grungy apartment, McAdams has never looked “less” sensuous, removing any hint of sex appeal, yet she is entirely focused upon getting the story, and James successfully makes the transition from live theater to movies.  The story is largely advanced through a succession of connecting scenes with quick dialogue, where there’s a mechanism behind this madness, as the audience is never force-fed material, but has to pick it up as it swiftly moves along, with the Spotlight team continually in search of more to the story, where the entire film is a tribute to the art of journalism and digging behind the stories, uncovering new leads, developing credible sources, where there is simply no time for tributes or adulation, though this team and the mammoth series of articles they wrote eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 2003, Boston Globe Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church.

Written by Josh Singer and the director Tom McCarthy, it’s important to note that the director was once an altar boy in New Provincetown, New Jersey, attending Boston College High School, an institution that itself became embroiled in the scandal, a Jesuit school located directly across from the Boston Globe offices, where in the film Robby is one of the significant alumnus, as are several of the important players involved.  At least initially, Baron suggests the Spotlight team follow up on a local story written by Globe columnist Eileen McNamara where one former priest, John Geoghan, was alleged to have molested many children years ago.  Within a matter of days, the investigative team discovered Geoghan was only one of a large number of priests who sexually molested children only to be reassigned to a different parish.  Rezendes finds a lead in Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), an underfunded but perpetual workaholic attorney representing victims who is under gag orders not to release names or information, but nonetheless Rezendes hounds him for help on the case while also discovering Richard Snipe (never seen, but heard as the voice of Richard Jenkins on the phone), a former Benedictine priest of 18-years who is now a trained psychologist conducting a 25-year study of the sexual practices of supposedly celibate Roman Catholic priests (the findings were published in 1990), only to discover that nearly 6% were known to have sexual abuse deviations.  Both Garabedian and Snipe were thoroughly discredited by the Catholic Church, where people looked upon their information with skepticism, refusing to believe this could possibly be true, but by the time they found 13 wayward priests, they thought that was the extent of the horror, only to discover that was just the tip of the iceberg, as the 6% indicator from the study would suggest a number closer to 100.  Pfeiffer on the other hand followed up on the victims, discovering there was a support group in place called SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, founded by Barbara Blaine, a resident of Toledo, Ohio who was herself sexually abused by a priest from junior high through high school (1969 – 1974), finally able to reveal the truth in 1989 when she founded the organization, exposing predators and those who shield them while helping to protect those that have been sexually abused, claiming 12,000 members in 56 different countries. 

Part of the ironic beauty of the film is that it takes place in Boston, which is nearly 50% Catholic, the largest consolidation of Catholics anywhere in the United States, yet the city has a small-town feel to it, as nearly everything falls under the umbrella of the church, whose influence reaches into the fabric of close-knit communities, defining the character, helping provide a moral authority and an example of benevolence that no one has questioned, yet one by one we see discredited witnesses who are psychologically shattered by their experiences, partly because the world around them simply refuses to accept the accusations that the church played any role in their mental deterioration, preferring to think they are psychologically damaged individuals that need mental health treatment to overcome their delusions.  As we see the reporters pound the pavement and go door to door, or see victims as they slink through the streets anonymously, the image of church spires looms over everything, an ominous presence sending a somber message that engulfs the world below with its omnipresent influence.  When Marty Barron meets Cardinal Law (Len Cariou) as a courtesy call, the Cardinal lectures the newcomer about his former work in the Civil Rights movement, inferring the church is part of the progressive struggle for human rights, suggesting the giant institutions of the church and the newspaper should work hand in hand, that everyone would be better served.  Barron has to hold his ethical ground, claiming newspapers must stand alone.  It is therefore no accident when Baron’s name is left off the invite list of a Catholic Charities social event, as he’s considered a Jewish transplant from Florida, already positioned by the church as an interloper, an excluded outsider who is “not one of us.”  One of the more conflicted characters in the film is a smooth-talking yet creepy Archdiocese lawyer named Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup) who helps resolve settlements for abuse victims that the church hopes will just disappear and remain silenced, claiming he fed material to the newspaper several years back, but nothing became of it, suggesting the paper itself censored the story, another thought that makes the viewers shudder, though eventually, through much prodding, he does confirm that the number of priests involved in settlements is closer to 100.

The structure of the film is building mounting tension as sequence by sequence information slowly accumulates, turning into a mechanized, procedural film that goes on for months, sidetracked by a humongous incident known as 9/11, where the story is advanced by asking questions through interviews, phone calls, digging into the newspaper’s archives, seeking out lost files, where there are plenty of opportunities for the investigation to derail.  Lost in all the ballyhooed interest is just how old-fashioned and out of date this picture is, how it could not have happened in the present age of social media where every tidbit of information becomes instant news, as we have instead become so enraptured by the prisoner-of-the-moment mentality where news leaks might have allowed the church to refute and distort the facts in public, shifting the focus elsewhere, where the precision of the film plays out like a greatest hits montage from yesteryear.  Certainly part of the underlying tension is watching the psychological toll the story takes out of each member of the Spotlight team, as all are themselves Catholics, where they view the world a little differently afterwards, where Carroll discovers a safe house for disgraced priests less than a block from his home, Pfeiffer has to break her grandmother’s heart, a woman who attends mass regularly, with the release of the news, Rezendes grows even more obsessed with a growing fear about the impact the church has on young unsuspecting kids, while Robby has to challenge some of the strongest bonds of friendship in pursuit of the story, including a strong turn from Jamey Sheridan as Jim Sullivan, a boyhood friend that works as an attorney representing the church who is reluctant to provide details.  The reporters discover 84 different lawsuits filed against Father Geoghan alone in his 30-year career, all of which were protected by a superior court confidentiality order, while relevant documents in the cases are simply missing from court records and could not be found.  The Globe decides to challenge the confidentiality order, which amounts to some 10,000 pages of church documents, claiming the public interest outweighs the church’s desire for privacy, and while awaiting the outcome, discovers the church’s own publications that list the assignment of every single priest, including names and addresses, as well as those who have been removed from active service, identified with the notations placed on sick leave, reassigned, or in between assignments.  Working from this list, reminiscent of the meticulous detail provided by the Nazi’s documenting the efficiency of their train scheduling during the Holocaust, the reporters are able to corroborate names given to them by in-person victim testimony, where the extensive scope of their investigation begins to take shape, as they have not only the names of sexually abusive priests, the names of their victims, but proof the offending priests had knowingly been reassigned, proving Cardinal Law and church officials were aware of these allegations for decades but did nothing to stop priests from preying upon new victims.  When the story finally runs, the 13 original priests found guilty of sexual abuse expands to 249 priests and more than 1000 victims, where the impact of the coverage generated a flurry of more victims coming forward, with more than 670 priests around the world exposed publicly.  In 2003, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston settled a group case of 552 victims for $85 million dollars.  A flood of abuse claims were filed in cities across the country and in dioceses across Europe, with five dioceses in America receiving bankruptcy protection, while eight others went bankrupt.  By 2012, the number of priests accused of sex abuse had risen to 3700, where nearly all were criminally charged, most were convicted and served time in prison.  More than 3000 lawsuits were filed against the Catholic Church in the United States, where the estimated payout from settlements of sex abuse cases from 1950 to 2012 has been more than $3 billion dollars.   

Note

One of the significant distinctions learned afterwards is that most priests are not pedophiles, as they are often labeled, as the general public tends to misuse the term for all children under the age of consent.  Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder defined by a persistent sexual attraction to prepubescent children.  As the large majority of the church sex abuse victims were aged 10 to 17, mostly boys, studies showed the offending priests were motivated less by a psychiatric disorder and more by an abuse of power, as they tended to prey upon the weaknesses of either sex, whoever happened to be the most vulnerable (often the most economically disadvantaged), using their power and church authority to invade the sexual innocence of their victims, many of whom acknowledged they felt priests represented the voice of God.  According to an independent John Jay Report in 2004 commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, studying the period from 1950 through 2002, 11,000 allegations were made against 4,392 priests in the United States, with most of the victims of this sex abuse scandal in early puberty to late adolescence, where the term for that is ephebophilia, where there is currently no psychiatric disorder listed for a sexual attraction to this age group.