The Ice Storm (1997)

.”…a family is like your own personal anti-matter. Your family is the void you emerge from and the place where you return to when you die. And that’s the paradox. The closer you’re drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go.”
Over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, a Connecticut family slides into moral deterioration.

Benjamin Hood (Kevin Kline) drowns his troubles at work with too much booze and an affair with a family friend, Janey (Sigourney Weaver). His wife Elena (Joan Allen), sick of his lies and affair, pumps herself full of pop self-help books but her own moral code is tested when the couple attends a “key party” with many of their friends.

Their son Paul (Tobey Maguire) is home from his high school prep boarding school but goes back into NYC to pursue a teenage girl (Katie Holmes). Their younger daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) is experimenting with liquor and teasing Janey’s teenage son Mike (Elijah Woods) while recklessly pursuing Mike’s little brother Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd).

I question why the couple would go out in the middle of a pretty intense ice storm to a party and tell Paul to take a cab home from the train station late at night because the roads will be dangerous with the ice. But that’s the way the story went.

When a terrible tragedy hits, the family is jolted into reality and struggle to figure out what’s really important in life.

Jamey Sheridan appears as Janey’s husband. Henry Czerny also appears.

Directed by Ang Lee.

Run time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

Rated R for sexuality and drug use, including scenes involving children, and for language.

My personal rating: C

Off the Map (2003)

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"It was inescapable, my father’s depression…like some fumigator’s mist filling our lungs. It seemed to be the focal point of our lives that summer. The geological center around which everything was defined.”
Twelve-year-old Bo Groden (Valentina De Angelis) longs for the life of a “normal” family with “a lawn and in-built sprinkler system.” Where she can be a Girl Scout, and have a phone. Instead, her father Charley (Sam Elliott) and mother Arlene (Joan Allen) live with Bo far off the road in the high mesa of northern New Mexico. They are 1970s refugees from the chaos of the city and live a very self-sufficient life by hunting and growing their own food, and scouring the dump and bartering for what they need or want. Bo is homeschooled but longs to go to school with other children.

But this story is about the summer Charley suffers a near catatonic depression. Arlene asks their friend George (J.K. Simmons) to go to a psychiatrist and pretend to be depressed in order to get medication for Charley.

In the midst of this, William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost), an IRS agent arrives to audit the family for tax evasion. Shortly upon arriving, William falls into fever that lasts for days and causes him to be delusional or sleep. Once he comes to his senses, the mysterious and tragic William turns to painting and never leaves the Groden farmstead.

Amy Brenneman also appears as the adult Bo reflecting on this difficult summer.

And I have to say, the stunning New Mexican landscape is just as much a character as any of the humans. The cinematography is often just breathtaking.

An exceptionally artistic, articulate and literate film with lines that remains memorable to me:

”…there is a hole in the day without you.”

“It has struck me to view the ocean as the past, the sky as the future, and the present as that thin, precarious line where both meet. Precarious because as we stand there, it curves underfoot, ever-changing.”

“Your life is yours.”

Directed by Scott Campbell.

Run time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

Rated PG-13.

My personal rating: A-

In Country (1989)

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"...a hole in my heart."
Teenager Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) never knew her father. She was born after he'd died in Vietnam. Her mother (Joan Allen) has remarried and lives in Lexington, Kentucky, while Samantha's Uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis) raised Samantha in their small Kentucky hometown.

When Samantha comes across photos of her father, love letters he'd written to her mother, his dog tags and ribbons, she becomes obsessed with finding out more about him. She questions her uncle about the war since Emmett had also served in Vietnam. She questions three of her uncle's friends (John Terry, Stephen Tobolowsky, Jim Beaver) who were also war vets but she gets little information. She's also trying to find help for Emmett as he's a loose cannon, has symptoms of Agent Orange toxicity, and flashbacks to the war.

Others in the cast include Kevin Anderson as Samantha's boyfriend; Heidi Swedberg as Samantha's best friend; Peggy Rae and Richard Hamilton as her grandparents; Judith Ivey as a women who is smitten with Emmett; and Patricia Richardson as a vet's wife.

From a novel by Bobbie Ann Mason. Directed by Norman Jewison.

Run time: 2 hours

Rated R.

My personal rating: B

The Contender (2000)

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"...principles only mean something if you stick by them when they're inconvenient."

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When the Vice-President dies, Democratic President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) must appoint a replacement. Approaching the end of his second term, he wants to leave an important legacy and therefore nominates Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), D-OH, a former Republican.

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But Congressman Sheldon "Shelly" Runyon, R-IL, (Gary Oldman), a major Republican opponent of the President, leads a McCarthy-esque witch hunt guised as the Congressional confirmation hearing. Runyon is set to discredit Senator Hanson on the basis of reports of her sexual indiscretion when she was in college. Fact of the matter is, the very conservative and disingenuous Runyon is opposed to all of Senator Hanson's positions on the abortion issue and religion, and his obvious disdain for powerful women. He seeks to humiliate her in whatever way he can.

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Some very interesting twists that made it a real keep-watching political thriller. Interesting, too, in the comparisons to President Clinton's indiscretions, references to Chappaquiddick. and a certain prophetic tone that hit home in terms of the 2008 presidential campaigns, the election of a fresh new attitude in Washington in 2009, and the national embarrassment of the gubernatorial scandal in Illinois.

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Also appearing are Christian Slater as the young senator and rising Democratic star from Delaware, Sam Elliott as a President's Chief of Staff, William Petersen as the Virginia governor who had been the preferred vice-presidential contender but was by-passed by the President, Saul Rubinek as the President's press secretary, Mike Binder as Senator Hanson's legal counsel, Philip Baker Hall as Senator Hanson's father and former Republican Governor of Ohio, Robin Thomas as Senator Hanson's husband and former campaign manager, Mariel Hemingway as Senator Hanson's former college chum and ex-wife of Hanson's current husband, Kathryn Morris as the FBI agent who thoroughly investigates the Virginia governor and Senator Hanson, Noah Fryrear as the Hanson's six-year-old son.

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Jeff Bridges and Kim Carnes sing the opening song -- "Ring of Fire" -- which all just seems so right!

Some of my favorite quotes from the film:

President Jackson Evans: "It pains my soul to tell you that you have brought blood and shame under this great dome. Your leadership has raised the stakes of hate to a new level where we can no longer separate the demagogue from the truly inspired. And believe this, there are traitors among us."

Senator Laine Hanson's closing statement at her confirmation hearing: "...and, Mr. Chairman, I stand for the separation of Church and State, and the reason that I stand for that is the same reason that I believe our forefathers did. It is not there to protect religion from the grasp of government but to protect our government from the grasp of religious fanaticism. Now, I may be an atheist, but that does not mean I do not go to church. I do go to church. The church I go to is the one that emancipated the slaves, that gave women the right to vote, that gave us every freedom that we hold dear. My church is this very Chapel of Democracy that we sit in together, and I do not need God to tell me what are my moral absolutes. I need my heart, my brain, and this church."

Written and directed by Rod Lurie.

Run time: 2 hours, 7 minutes

Rated R for strong sexual content and language.

My personal rating: A