The Ice Storm is a dark, multifaceted, isolating, and character-driven coming-of-age/slice-of-life film and arguably director Ang Lee’s best work. In a 1970s affluent Connecticut suburb, two families—the Hoods and the Carvers—intertwine in each other’s lives in perplexing and inflective ways. Elena Hood (Joan Allen) struggles to keep married life to her husband Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) exciting, but she doesn’t know how to solve their boredom. Ben, dissatisfied with his career, home life and lack of a sex life, has an affair with Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), who along with her husband Jim Carver (Jamey Sheridan) are close friends with the Hoods. The Hoods’ children—16 year old Paul (Tobey Maguire) and 14 year old Wendy (Christina Ricci)—have their own teenage problems. Paul is in love with a classmate, Libbets Casey (Katie Holmes), experiencing difficulty in connecting with her through his nerdiness—especially as his more sexually experienced braggart of a roommate also becomes interested in Casey. Wendy enjoys sexual games, messing around with the Carver kids behind a veil of political sharpness; she’ll make out with same-age loner Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood) whilst stripping with his younger brother Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd) when Mikey’s elsewhere. In a slow-burning, casually cataclysmic intersection of these two families over a Thanksgiving break, relationships teeter, kids explore themselves and each other, and adults appear as adolescently clumsy as their children. Anchored by Paul’s Fantastic Four comic reflections amongst other metaphors and symbols, The Ice Storm illustrates the many gray zones of human choices and actions.

Director Ang Lee is best known for getting lost in details. In many of his works, From Hulk to Life of Pi, the granularity of Lee’s created or inherited characters take center stage for better or worse—and often it’s the latter. With The Ice Storm, however, Lee manages to ground the characters through such excessive detailing to mostly profound results. For example, Wendy at first seems like a more typical filmic young, parent-rich teen, as she skirts around town with Mikey to make out and saying “It’s incredible. He should be shot.… He’s a liar,” every time she watches President Richard Nixon defend himself over Watergate on her family TV. But partially due to Mikey’s withdrawn nature and her impatience for bodily exploration, she teases around with Sandy multiple times before giving Mikey another chance whilst in a Nixon Halloween mask.

This association to Nixon both represents the perplexities of human contradiction and how unaware we are of them; Wendy denigrates Nixon for lying about Watergate and his other morally not-so-great in-office actions, while she herself in a way lies to both Mikey and Sandy to get the (as of now, undiscovered) kinds of sexual gratification she anticipates. She learns the cruel bounds of lust and hookup culture which, when compared to her parents’ rapidly deteriorating marriage, reinforces how the already demanding social norms of affluent white heteronormative tradition are much more constrictive than luxurious. It’s a somber reality, and none of it is talked about openly enough for people to make better decisions. “Whenever you have questions, ask me and we’ll… look it up,” Ben hesitantly tells Paul after floundering around the birds, bees, and other “adult” topics without actually explaining anything. Now add the same amount of different meanings, substance abuse, shameful actions, depressing undertones, and slightly creepy personality quirks into the other seven characters’ storylines with a mystifying score and an affair, and Ice is a densely impactful display of lust and drugs or drinks v. loyalty and safety when you’ve got either too little or too much time on your hands.

Like Ang Lee’s other works, unfortunately, Ice is also burdened by its granularity. In focusing so much on the film’s dynamics, there’s no real forward motion or firmly graspable narrative. If you look Ice up on Wikipedia, only about the last third of the film gets detailed in Wiki’s “Plot” heading, because the first two thirds are murky; dynamics are organic and the tone morose, but it’s hard to really encapsulate anything because nothing and everything happens at the same time. It’s also tumultuous thanks to a snail’s pace. But for Ang Lee fans, fans of any of the film’s big names (especially since Paul is basically Maguire’s Spider-Man alternate Peter Parker before he was even cast for Sam Raimi’s trilogy), or morosely introspective drama fans, The Ice Storm definitely freezes your nerves in sadness.

Screens in 35 mm Wednesday, 2/5, 8:00 pm @ The Brattle Theatre
Part of the ongoing repertory series: Dread of Winter