Starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver and Joan Allen Directed by Ang Lee Rated R, with profanity, sex and drug use Running time 112 minutes Jack gives this film a rating of 8 out of 10

(Nov. 7, 1997) -- Ice. It's cold, hard and slippery.

The same thing can be said for The Ice Storm, Ang Lee's moody but often-fascinating drama of wayward suburbanites, adrift in the Connecticut of 1973.

Adapted from Rick Moody's 1994 novel, The Ice Storm coldly examines the lives of characters who have been numbed by sex, drugs and political upheaval of the previous decade, and are now trying to make their lives meaningful in suburbia.

The Big Chill comes to New Canaan.

But note the slippery, subtle ways director Lee and screenwriter James Schamus make us care about two families of characters who don't care about each other -- or about themselves. Certainly, they all think they're looking for love. But it's in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways.

Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) envisions himself a capable husband and father, but he also looks forward to his frequent forays in bed with a married neighbor, Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver). Ben's wife, Elena (Joan Allen), gets her cheap thrills by shoplifting at the local drugstore and flirting with a long-haired minister.

The Hoods' daughter, Wendy, a precocious 14-year-old, is already a cynic's delight, arguing for Nixon's impeachment and praying sarcastically at Thanksgiving about the way the white man has ripped off the Indians.

But Wendy is also in need of affection -- and also as curious as any young teen. She looks for answers in exploratory relationships, fumbling around with the two young Carver boys next door (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd).

Wendy's 16-year-old prep school brother (Tobey Maguire) comes home for Thanksgiving, but then heads into Manhattan for what he hopes will be a romantic night with a classmate. When he plies her with pills (to make her more ... willing), she simply falls asleep.

The Hood and Carver parents, meanwhile, spend Friday night with other "friends" at a suburban key party -- an event in which the various couples throw their car keys into a bowl -- and then swap spouses when the keys are selected at random from the bowl at the end of the evening.

This is an embarrassing and nearly implausible event -- but one that works as a metaphor for the way the sexual revolution of the '60s settled into middle-class suburban life in the early '70s.

While the couples nervously shuffle into various combinations inside, the rain turns to ice outside. And a tragedy awaits that'll awaken the Hoods and Carvers from their lethargy like a cold, hard slap.

Ang Lee brings an outsider's observations to the suburban culture, much as he did to the 19th-century English world of Sense and Sensibility.

He also aptly underscores the depressing gloom of the piece through the dark, blue-tinted cinematography of the talented Frederick Elmes, and the nervously restrained low-key performances of his superb ensemble of actors.