[In the following excerpt, Merkin offers a tempered assessment of the film adaptation of The Ice Storm.]

Here's what I can't figure out about The Ice Storm, the intelligent but curiously remote movie that's been made from Rick Moody's novel: Is the anomie—the soul rot—that eats away at everyone in it best attributed to suburbia, to the seventies, or to the human condition as exemplified by the involutions of Yankee character? The movie is set in New Canaan, Connecticut, and affluent suburbs are always suspect—suggesting, as they do, an implicitly failed American ideal, with loneliness and anxiety lurking behind the white picket fences and well-clipped lawns. Then again, there is the retrospective absurdity of the decade itself, with its touchy-feely notions of sexual openness and “self-realization.” To this end, Ang Lee, the director, has re-created the year 1973 down to the last incriminating detail: water beds, crocheted vests, the Watergate hearings, and couples therapy. And yet the two families at the center of the movie act so disconnected and dazed—so, well, dysfunctional, except that the word hadn't yet come into use, sparing us the need for further descriptives—that the temptation to blame the movie's bleakness on the nature of family life itself is strong. Or perhaps the weather is the culprit here: one of those relentlessly gray Northeastern winters capped by a freak storm, which serves as both metaphor and explanation for the desolate mood that bears down on the unhappy adults and the even unhappier adolescents.

From its first shot of an ice-encrusted train waiting on a deserted stretch of track, The Ice Storm is obsessed with time and place, almost to the exclusion of narrative. We are provided with glimpses of almost-scenes: a dorm room featuring an enormous bong; a pretty girl in a literature seminar who earnestly identifies with Dostoyevsky because he is “existential”; a boy on a train ride home from prep school for Thanksgiving, reflecting that “a family is your own personal antimatter, the void you emerge from.” Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is married to the silently despairing Elena (Joan Allen), who shoplifts cosmetic items from the friendly neighborhood pharmacy and talks to their children (Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci) as though she'd never met them before. Ben is given to fussy neckwear—ascots, and turtlenecks layered under his shirts—and is having a halfhearted affair with his next-door neighbor, Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), who specializes in inexplicably bitchy behavior. When he tries to engage her in postcoital conversation, fumbling around for some emotional closeness, she interrupts him with the withering observation “I have a husband, I don't particularly feel the need for another.” She is clearly a woman who considers herself shortchanged by life in New Canaan, and has coolly retreated into her own head; even the sexual transgressions of her two sons (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd) don't elicit much of a reaction from her beyond the statement that “a person's body is his temple” and allusions to puberty rites in Samoa.

The story, which culminates in a disastrous couples-swapping “key party,” benefits from the same gently ironic touch that Lee brought to his trilogy of films about the clash between old and new Chinese values. He's less interested in assigning blame for all the misery than in simply documenting it, and showing how it spreads and gets absorbed. At times, though, his approach seems so precise, so scrupulously neutral, as to verge on the clinical. (He isn't helped much by James Schamus's screenplay, which has some very good patches of dialogue but is short on exposition.) Still, in its refusal to provide explanations, The Ice Storm is never less than intriguing to watch—if a bit baffling. I kept expecting everything—the infidelities, the aimlessness, the casual shoplifting—to be resolved in the scene after next, but it doesn't happen that way. There is no triumphant burst of communication, no message-waving final moment. There is instead the pure, impartial gesture of the movie's ending: the small, relieved smile that comes over a boy's face as he waits in a train station and spots his family coming to get him, shaken but intact in the wake of the storm.