SOURCE: “Family Matters,” in New Yorker, September 29, 1997, pp. 86–7.

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...