Like many a non-American, I have always been faintly puzzled by Thanksgiving. A cold-weather holiday intended to gather families for celebratory feasting mere weeks before Christmas – so close as to make it seem like a dry run. (A very dry run, if you’re unlucky with the turkey.) But it seems to have its own distinct tail-end-of-autumn mood, as defined by the particular subgenre of the Thanksgiving movie: where the prototypical Christmas film is twinkly, sugar-dusted and ripe with seasonal joy, its Thanksgiving counterpart – think Planes, Trains and Automobiles or Home for the Holidays – tends to focus heavily on fractious encounters, awkward reunions and familial strife.
Perhaps no Thanksgiving film has struck a sharper note than Ang Lee’s magnificently desolate The Ice Storm – getting a 4K rerelease on VOD and Bluray from Studiocanal ahead of this year’s holiday. A stark, tart, frostbitten adaptation of Rick Moody’s acerbic novel about middle-class discontent over a tense Thanksgiving weekend in the Nixon era, it proved a little too harsh for most viewers when it came out in the autumn of 1997. Its US distributor, Fox Searchlight, wasn’t such a holiday killjoy as to release it over Thanksgiving, instead opting for a late September date. It earned a mere $8m at the US box office, less than half its budget; though it won good reviews and a Cannes screenplay award, it made nary a ripple at the Oscars, and was soon filed away as a noble flop.
Yet it has aged with quiet dignity: in the ranks of suburban-rot films that flooded cinemas in the late 90s, it has more gravitas than Sam Mendes’s once lavishly garlanded American Beauty, and remains an easier, more elegant watch than Todd Solondz’s challengingly toxic Happiness. Following two neighbouring, well-off Connecticut families as they use the holiday to act out a surfeit of marital, economic and existential frustrations, The Ice Storm is darkly hilarious in its observation of tightly wound Americans experimenting with new social norms against a wider backdrop of sexual revolution and political corruption in the mid-70s. The image of Sigourney Weaver (pictured) as a would-be cool mum, resplendent in a fur-collared coat and wielding a snaky leather whip, captures this transitional era with high-camp economy.
But there are no cheap shots in Lee’s film: it’s breath-catchingly pained and delicate in articulating estrangements and losses, aggravated by a November cold snap so tangibly felt in Frederick Elmes’s crisp, brittle cinematography and the icicle-tapping tones of Mychael Danna’s score. It might well be the most immaculate work in Lee’s stylistically roving career, though to this day it is underseen and underappreciated. If you have no investment in a happy Thanksgiving next week, it’s the perfect time to give it another look.
Photograph by Getty Images