New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1973 seems today nearly as foreign and far away as provincial England of the 19th century. A wealthy, woody suburban enclave, this home of the unsatisfied upper crust is just getting wind of the late-'60s sexual revolution. An ill, not to mention rank, wind it is too, and coupled with ongoing revelations of the Watergate investigation, it threatens to blow down the community's façade of family values. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline), for example, catches young next-door neighbor Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood) dry-humping his daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) in the Carvers' basement playroom. Ben is in the Carver house in the first place because he's having an affair with Mikey's mother, Janey (Sigourney Weaver); nonetheless he berates his 13-year-old daughter and her beardless swain and irately escorts her home.

Meanwhile, Ben's glaze-eyed 15-year-old son, Paul, makes tentative efforts to dispose of his virginity at his preppy boarding school, focusing on spoiled teenybopper Libbets Casey (Katie Holmes), who invites him to join her for recreational drugs at her parent-vacated Park Avenue penthouse. Undeterred by her father's admonitions, Wendy tries to extend her conquests in the Carver household by playing doctor and then some with Mikey's pre-pubescent kid brother Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd). Numbed by her husband's infidelity and despairing of the feel-good pop therapies of the period, Ben's wife, Elena (Joan Allen), resorts to shoplifting. All comes to a head, of sorts, when the couples convene at a wife-swapping "key" party and the pathetically fallacious storm of the title freezes everything into a snow globe of lethal beauty.

Adult hypocrisy and adolescent concupiscence in the suburbs is nothing new, but unlike the book, Lee and his actors overcome stereotype to find new humor and humanity in the premise. They wander through their void of a world (which Ang re-creates with a loving feel for bad fashion sense and worse pop-cultural fetishes and philosophies) seemingly without a clue, stumbling into their petty, self-fulfilling tragedies with plaintive wilfullness.

The adult actors convey with heartbreaking precision their characters' disillusionment and non-comprehension. Kline accords Ben a depth of misery and a slow-dying decency that makes his fall from grace resonate far beyond the mere come-uppance of a scumbag. Joan Allen finds fresh poignance for her now patented role of the wronged wife, and Weaver's tough-cookie Janey brings to her hardbitten silence a ring of pathos. Only Jamey Sheridan makes a vague impression as Janey's husband, Jim, which is perhaps appropriate. The young actors, on the other hand, may be too young to be in touch with the times or with their motivations: Wendy's sexual predation, Paul's disaffection, Mikey's loopiness, Sandy's mute weirdness.

Some of Lee's touches are lacking in subtlety (does Wendy have to be wearing a Nixon mask during her indiscretion with Mikey?), but for the most part the sexual pratfalls are underplayed to the point of somnambulism. This makes the familiar strange, but also at times a little strained. The detachment is underscored by a snide, semi-stoned voiceover narrative from Paul, the character least involved in the central events. Stranded in a marooned commuter-rail car at the height of the storm, he broods on the parallels between the Fantastic Four and the mystery of family ties. Lee broods too, and it's not until the film's dazzling dawn epiphany that he finally chills out.

NEW YORK -- Ang Lee knew he was in the clear when, at The Ice Storm's first showing before an American audience, no one burst out laughing as a character is accidentally electrocuted.

"They were deadly quiet," he says, no pun intended. "So that's a sign -- they didn't giggle -- that's a sign they were riveted to the movie. I think it played quite effectively. We went to Cannes, which is a big audience. Very enthusiastic. But this is the first American, native, group reaction. I heard some sobbing. I heard a lot of laughing. They seemed to be in synch with the movie."

Lee was relieved that the audience bought not only the film's emotional veracity but its period authenticity. Set in America's wife-swapping suburbs in 1973, in the wake of the sexual revolution and during the crumbling of the Nixon administration, The Ice Storm is terra incognita for Lee -- who didn't relocate to America from his native Taiwan until 1978 -- but not for much of its intended audience. The care and thoroughness he expended in re-creating the spirit, culture, clothing, and decor might bring a twinge of déjà vu to anyone who survived that benighted era.

Some of the trappings he could relate to. "Like the metal ice trays. Remember how your hands get stuck in one of those? That was nostalgic for me. But I don't know where they got most of that stuff. The toe socks, I think, came from Pennsylvania. But the pharmacy. How the hell did they dress the whole pharmacy with period things?"

Mostly, though, it was by relating to the characters that Lee was able to get in tune. "I felt close to Mikey, the spaced-out kid. I remember directing Elijah Wood and saying, `Your speech is not right, it's too clear, too articulated. You're two seconds behind everyone. Try to loosen up here a little bit, let your jaw slacken when you talk.' And he got the idea right away.

"That was me as a kid. I was very spaced out. My feet barely touched the ground. So I related to him. Beyond that, I felt closest to Kevin. It's my fear of being an American father in a modern world. I was raised like his character in the '50s. Sexually, socially, politically, our upbringing was very similar: conservative. Family's good for you, do the right thing, be a family man. And all of a sudden the social code says you're supposed to level with your kid. You have to explain things, not just shout your orders. I had to act like a parent, someone they can look up to as a role model, but on the inside I'm less than a kid. So I very much identify with Kevin. In my older Chinese movies, such as Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet, I used my father as the father role. Here I am the father."

Lee could identify with Kline's character in being befuddled by society's changing sexual mores. "The sexual revolution caught up in Taiwan 10 or 15 years later. So the '70s hit them in the late '80s, probably. I was reading just the other day in a Chinese newspaper they found this Web site and people use it for wife-swapping. I think to a certain degree the first lines in the movie Jerry McGuire are quite true. He says America sets the tone for the world. Sooner or later it hits everywhere, it's just the pace of human civilization. So what happened in 1973 in Connecticut happened in 1969 in California or New York and in '85 in Taiwan, and, I don't know, 2001 in Iran."