“The Ice Storm” (1997)
Curiously undervalued on release (it won Best Screenplay at Cannes, but failed to pick up a single Oscar nomination, and proved a box office disappointment), a decade and a half of passing time, and a Criterion release, has seen “The Ice Storm” takes its rightful place as one of Lee’s finest achievements. Based on Rick Moody‘s acclaimed 1994 novel, it sees Lee once again turn his lens on family, but for the first time looking at WASP-ish American suburban life, through two families in 1970s Connecticut. Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) are hardly happily married. Ben is having an affair with promiscouous neighbor Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), whose own teenage son Mikey (Elijah Wood) is experimenting with the Hood’s daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci). Meanwhile, older son Paul (Tobey Maguire) has sex on the mind too, hoping to beat his roommate Francis (David Krumholtz) to sleeping with classmate Libbets (a pre-“Dawson’s Creek” Katie Holmes). Everything comes to a head as an ice storm hits the town, leading to tragedy. It’s rare for an ensemble piece such as this to give everyone a fair shake, but almost every character (even one like Janey’s husband, played by “Homeland” actor Jamey Sheridan) gets material of real weight to deal with, and the cast continually surprise with the deftness of their performances, from career-best turns from veterans Kline and Weaver to head-turning newcomers like Maguire (in his first major lead role), and Holmes. James Schamus’ screenplay is sharper and darker than anything he’d done with Lee up to this point, marking a shift away from the comedies of manners of the director’s first four films to more complex territory, but his trademark empathy is retained too. And Lee has evolved as a filmmaker too; the closing sequences during the storm are among the most beautiful things he’s filmed to date. Overshadowed by near-contemporary fare like “American Beauty” and “Happiness,” it might be actually be smarter and more moving than either. [A]
“Ride With The Devil” (1999)
Lee spent his first five films going from success to success, but came unstuck somewhat with “Ride With The Devil,” a $40 million Civil War movie that received more muted reviews than its predecessors, and, buried by strong competition at the box office, failed to make back even $1 million. Again, a Criterion release (of Lee’s longer director’s cut) has helped to restore the film’s reputation, but in our eyes, it still falls a little way short of the lost masterpiece some have claimed it as. Based on Daniel Woodrell‘s novel “Woe To Live On,” it centers on Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), a German-American in Missouri who, with best friend Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet “Johnny Depp Was Unavailable” Ulrich), join the guerilla-style Bushwhackers on the Confederate side after Chiles’ father is murdered by Jayhawkers. Along the way, they join up with freed slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), and both fall for pro-Confederate widow Sue Lee Shelley (country star Jewel, in her only major acting role). Looking at the story of the war from the perspective of the South feels unusual, even a little daring these days, and Lee certainly brings a fresh perspective; it’s a gritty, brutal, ground-level view, owing almost as much to Vietnam as to other Civil War movies. And one has to admire the meditative pace (especially in Lee’s two-and-a-half hour director’s cut) and the complex, novelistic nature of the film; there’s no attempt to shoehorn in a traditional narrative or anything similar. But it ultimately makes the film something of a difficult watch, not helped by the way in which Lee’s instincts for putting the right person in the right role seem, for once, to have failed him. Wright is the stand-out, but much of the cast, from Maguire downwards, feel miscast. It’s not so much that the likes of Jewel and Ulrich are bad, it’s more that they’re merely adequate (especially given that Schamus’ dialogue here isn’t his finest),and when Mark Ruffalo crops up in a smallish role, it’s hard not to wish he’d been given something more prominent, over someone like Maguire or Jonathan Rhys Meyers. There are some exceptional scenes and moments in there, but it still feels like something of a misstep for the director. [C+]
