TWO of the most highly touted movies at the recent New York Film Festival were The Ice Storm and Boogie Nights; I don’t know which I disliked more. Seeming opposites, the former is about upper-middle-class lives of quiet desperation in New Canaan, Connecticut; the latter, about making pornographic movies in the San Fernando Valley during the late Seventies and early Eighties. Yet they have something in common: neither of them knows how to get inside its characters, however much it moans or moons about them.
The Ice Storm is based on a novel by Rick Moody that, on casual leafing through, seems more interesting than the film, but not much so. The screenplay is by James Schamus—a producer/screenwriter/film teacher at Columbia University—who has here dreamed up scenes that make no sense. Take the one wherein a girl apparently about to deliver oral sex to a youth passes out from a pill she took. He just sits and sits there for ages with her head between his knees. Then he finally gets up and goes home.
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