Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting unless your book club is prepared to spend the whole Thanksgiving weekend in New Canaan with the Hoods.

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CHARACTERS: WHO IN THIS FAMILY IS LEAST EQUIPPED TO HANDLE FREEDOM?
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  1. Casting Call from the Suburb
    When Kevin Kline appeared as Ben Hood — handsome, hapless, wearing adultery like a man who borrowed it from someone more confident — did your mental image of the novel’s Ben nod in recognition or squint in mild surprise? Same question for Joan Allen as Elena, Sigourney Weaver as Janey Carver, Christina Ricci as Wendy, and Tobey Maguire as Paul. The novel is Rick Moody’s ferocious, semi-autobiographical farewell to his own dysfunctional family. Did the film’s ensemble feel like the right faces for that very specific Connecticut rage?
  2. Ben Hood 1.0 vs. Ben Hood 2.0 (Now Without the Alcoholism)
    One of the most significant things Schamus’s script quietly does is remove Ben’s alcoholism — in the novel he drinks heavily, and his drinking is woven into his moral collapse. The film’s Ben is just a man having an affair, which is somehow both more ordinary and slightly less comprehensible. Did the removal of the alcoholism make Ben more or less sympathetic? Does Kevin Kline’s performance fill in what the script took out, or is there a gap at the center of the character where a specific kind of self-destruction used to be?
  3. Elena Hood: More Sinned Against Than Sinning
    Schamus’s screenplay softens Elena considerably from the novel — in the book her last actions are described as shockingly cruel, while the film’s Elena comes off as a woman absorbing damage rather than inflicting it. Did you feel that difference? Is the film’s Elena a more sympathetic but less interesting character than the novel’s? And did Joan Allen’s quiet, precise performance make Elena’s containment feel like strength or damage — or both at exactly the same time?
  4. Janey Carver: What Is She Actually Playing At?
    Sigourney Weaver’s Janey is one of the film’s most discussed performances — cool, self-possessed, reading self-help books during sex and deploying boredom like a weapon. The novel gives her more interior life; the film trusts Weaver’s surface entirely. Did that surface feel more or less frightening than the novel’s interiority? What is Mrs. Carver actually playing at? Did either version give you a satisfying answer, or is her opacity the whole point?
  5. Wendy Hood: The Most Competent Person in the Film
    Christina Ricci’s Wendy is curious, experimentally minded, and considerably more self-aware than either of her parents — she is arguably the only character in the film who is actually paying attention to what’s happening around her. Did the novel’s Wendy feel as observant and as abandoned as the film’s? And did either version make you feel the specific tragedy of a teenager who is more competent than the adults theoretically in charge of her?
  6. Paul Hood: The Narrator Who Becomes a Supporting Character
    In the novel, Paul is the retrospective narrator — the book ends with the revelation that Moody himself is Paul, the befuddled son who grew up to write this very novel as a reckoning with his family. The film strips this entirely, making Paul just one thread in the ensemble and removing the metafictional layer that gives the novel much of its structure and emotional charge. Did you miss Paul’s narrative voice? And does Tobey Maguire’s performance — stranded in New York with a girl who barely notices him — carry the weight of a character who was always meant to be the story’s hidden spine?
  7. Mikey Carver: The Storm’s Casualty
    Mikey’s death is the event around which everything else organizes itself emotionally, and Elijah Wood plays him with a dreamy, slightly otherworldly quality that makes his end feel both random and inevitable. Did the novel or the film make you feel Mikey’s death more? Does the film’s staging of it — the ice, the electrical current, the terrible quiet — match or exceed the novel’s version? And did either version earn the weight that death has to carry for the story to work?

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PLOT SURGERY: WHAT GOT FROZEN IN, WHAT GOT LEFT OUTSIDE
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  1. From Character Chapters to Simultaneous Juxtaposition
    The novel organizes itself largely by character — each chapter focusing on one consciousness at a time, building a portrait through accumulated individual perspectives. Schamus’s screenplay abandons this entirely, cutting between simultaneous activity to reveal connections between characters the novel would have developed sequentially. Did the film’s juxtaposition method feel like the right cinematic translation of the novel’s structure? Which approach made you feel the family’s entanglement more acutely — one perspective at a time, or all of them at once?
  2. The Metafictional Layer: Author as Character
    The novel ends with the disclosure that the narrator is Rick Moody himself — that Paul Hood is Moody’s alter ego and this entire story is a semi-autobiographical reckoning with a real family and a real Thanksgiving. The film removes this entirely, treating the story as pure fiction. How much does that metafictional layer matter to your reading of the novel? Does knowing Moody is Paul change the weight of everything that happened? And does the film, by removing it, become a more or less honest version of the story?
  3. Billy Wilder to Mychael Danna: The Tone That Emerged
    Lee and Schamus initially conceived The Ice Storm as a satirical comedy in the Billy Wilder tradition — sharp, funny, morally observant but not devastating. The film that emerged is something entirely different: elegy, not satire. Lee has said he only fully understood the film’s tone when he first heard Mychael Danna’s score against the rough cut. Did the film find the right tone, or did you occasionally feel the ghost of the Billy Wilder version underneath the one you were watching? And did the novel want to be a comedy, or was it always an elegy disguised as one?
  4. The Key Party: Swinging as Social Critique
    The key party — suburban adults dropping their car keys in a bowl and going home with whoever they draw — is both the novel’s most satirical set piece and its most genuinely sad. Both versions use it as the pivot on which the story’s moral chaos turns. Did the film find the right register for the key party — the absurdity and the loneliness in equal measure — or did it tip too far toward one end? And did either version make it feel like a symptom of something larger, or just a very bad idea in a very bad year?
  5. Watergate and Vietnam in the Background
    Both versions are explicitly set in 1973 — Nixon on television, Vietnam still running, the specific cultural exhaustion of a country that has spent years being lied to by people in authority. The novel embeds this political context more richly; the film uses it more sparingly. Did either version make you feel the connection between the national mood and the personal moral collapse happening in New Canaan? Or did the political backdrop feel like period decoration rather than genuine cause?
  6. The Ice Storm Itself: Weather as Moral Architecture
    The storm is not simply a setting — it is the story’s governing metaphor: the world freezing over, everything becoming treacherous underfoot, the false clarity of ice that makes everything look clean while hiding what’s broken underneath. Did each version use the storm as effectively as a metaphor? Which medium made the ice feel more morally loaded — Moody’s prose, which can tell you what it means, or Lee’s camera, which can show you what it looks like?

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TONE & VIBE: WHAT KIND OF COLD IS THIS, EXACTLY?
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  1. A Movie of Surfaces? The Distance Question
    Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised the film but noted it elects to keep its characters and their emotions at a distance. Brian D. Johnson accused it of skating along the surface. David Ansen asked why, if the characters are stick figures, the film still carries lingering weight. Do you agree with any of these diagnoses? Is the film’s distance a failure of empathy or a formal strategy — the camera keeping its distance the way these families keep their distance from each other? And did the novel feel warmer, or just louder?
  2. The 1970s Without Kitsch
    One critic credited the film with cutting through the kitsch to explore the emotional black hole at the heart of the period. The 1970s is a decade that screen adaptations frequently romanticize or lampoon. Did the film’s production design — the avocado-green kitchens, the wood paneling, the polyester, the specific ugliness of aspirational 1973 — feel like a world you believed in rather than a costume? And did Moody’s prose render the same era with the same discipline, or was the novel more willing to let the period details be funny?
  3. Ang Lee’s Outsider Eye
    Lee first came to the United States in 1978 — five years after the events of this story — and approached New Canaan as a period piece in the same way he’d approached Jane Austen’s England in Sense and Sensibility. The Criterion essay credits this outsider perspective with allowing Lee to see the period without nostalgia or embarrassment. Did you feel that outsider quality in the film — a cool, almost anthropological gaze at a very specific American dysfunction? And is there an argument that an outsider was actually better positioned to adapt Moody’s novel than someone who’d grown up inside exactly this world?
  4. Devastating and Adult: The Kind of Film Nobody Makes Anymore
    One critic wrote that The Ice Storm is representative of what people have in mind when they talk about the kind of movie that doesn’t get made anymore — meaning an adult drama about middle-class American failure that doesn’t resolve into redemption or comedy. Do you agree? What specifically makes it feel like a different era of filmmaking? And does the novel, published three years before the film, feel like it belongs to the same cultural moment — or does it come from a slightly different literary tradition than the film comes from cinematically?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: WHO GOT CLOSER TO THE EMOTIONAL BLACK HOLE?
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  1. Schamus’s Central Challenge: Visual Emotion Without a Voice
    Schamus described the central problem of the adaptation as finding a visual way to create the emotional effect that Moody achieved through the narrator’s voice. The novel’s voice is ferocious, intimate, and explicitly retrospective — someone looking back at catastrophe with full knowledge of what it cost. The film has no narrator. Did Schamus solve the problem? Did Lee’s camera find an equivalent for that voice, or is there a specific quality of the novel’s retrospective grief that no visual language can replicate?
  2. Scenes That the Film Staged Better Than You Imagined
    Name one moment where Lee’s camera gave you something Moody’s prose couldn’t: the ice-covered landscape at dawn, the key party seen from the outside, the specific quality of a family driving home in silence after something irreversible has happened. Which visual moment felt like the best possible version of what this story needed?
  3. What the Book Did That the Film Couldn’t
    Moody’s prose has a specific quality — raw, frank, intricate, occasionally beautiful, always slightly ferocious. Were there passages — interior monologues, the retrospective narrator’s reckoning with his own family, the texture of a character’s self-deception rendered from the inside — that no amount of good acting could replicate? Name one thing the novel gave you that the screen was structurally unable to deliver.
  4. The Climax: Two Families, One Storm, Constant Perspective Shifts
    The ice-storm climax is where the film most decisively departs from the novel’s character-by-character structure, cutting rapidly between all the story’s threads as everything converges. Critics credited this as one of the film’s formal achievements — the juxtaposition enhancing both the drama and the generational themes. Did the film’s climax feel more or less devastating than the novel’s? And was there a specific cut — a specific juxtaposition — that hit hardest?

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THEMES: FREEDOM, EMPTINESS, AND THE THINGS THE 1970s BROKE
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  1. Sexual Freedom as a Form of Avoidance
    Both versions present the adults’ experimentation not as liberation but as a symptom of something missing — an attempt to feel something, anything, in lives that have become emotionally uninhabited. Did the novel or the film make you feel that distinction more clearly: the difference between freedom and emptiness wearing freedom’s clothes? And did either version make you feel any sympathy for the adults’ fumbling attempts — or just a kind of cold pity?
  2. The Children Are More Adult Than the Adults
    Wendy and Mikey and Paul are navigating genuine complexity — desire, mortality, the confusion of adolescence — with more self-awareness than their parents bring to any of the same questions. Did both versions make you feel the specific indictment of that inversion? Is there a version of this story where the parents are sympathetic, or is the point that the children’s clarity is only possible because they haven’t yet learned to be as successfully self-deceived as their elders?
  3. Watergate as Domestic Metaphor
    Ben Hood’s affair, the key party, the general atmosphere of transgression and cover-up — both versions position these events against the backdrop of a president conducting his own cover-up on national television. Did either version make the Watergate parallel feel earned rather than schematic? Is there a risk that the political metaphor is too neat — that it explains the characters’ moral failures in a way that lets them off the hook by making them symptoms of history rather than people making choices?
  4. The Retribution Reel: Does the Ending Earn Its Weight?
    Jonathan Rosenbaum famously accused the film of puritanical Hollywood yuppie-think, right down to its inevitable retribution reel — the idea that Mikey’s death functions as punishment for the adults’ transgression, that the film can’t resist a moral accounting. Do you agree? Does Mikey’s death feel like consequence or coincidence in each version? And is there a difference between a story that includes punishment and a story that requires it?
  5. Connecticut as a State of Mind
    Both versions are saturated with the specific texture of a certain kind of Connecticut life — the commuter trains, the colonial houses, the unspoken rules about what success is supposed to look like, the specific loneliness of people who have everything the culture told them to want. Did either version make New Canaan feel like a real place whose geography produces specific people, or like a stand-in for a more universal American condition? And is there a version of this story that could be set somewhere else?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: HOW MUCH DID SCHAMUS SOFTEN THE BLOW?
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  1. Ferocious Farewell vs. Delicate Elegy
    The Criterion essay describes Moody’s novel as a ferocious farewell to his own dysfunctional family and Schamus’s script as having softened it into something more delicate. Do you agree that the film is softer than the book? Is softening a betrayal of the source material, or is it the right adaptation choice for a visual medium that can’t reproduce prose ferocity? And which version’s emotional temperature — the novel’s ferocity or the film’s elegy — felt truer to what actually happened to those families?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the novel, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Use of Ice as a Moral Condition; Best Performance of Someone Whose Self-Deception Has Become a Full-Time Job; Best Deployment of Watergate as Domestic Metaphor; Best Outsider Eye Pointed at a Very Specific American Dysfunction; Best Scene That Made You Feel the Grief of a Family That Doesn’t Know How to Talk to Itself.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — novel or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they’re the kind of reader who needs to like at least one character to stay engaged? If they grew up in exactly this kind of Connecticut suburb and are still processing it? If they’re interested in the 1970s as a cultural moment rather than in these particular families? And is there a case that the film is actually the more accessible entry point to a novel that some readers find deliberately alienating?
  4. Order of Operations
    Novel then film, film then novel, or just one and done? Does reading the novel first mean you spend the film mourning the removed alcoholism, the softened Elena, the lost metafictional layer? Does watching the film first give you faces and a landscape that make the novel’s characters easier to inhabit — or does Kline-as-Ben make it harder to recover Moody’s more abrasive original? And is there an argument that the novel and the film are doing sufficiently different things that experiencing both is less like seeing two versions of one story and more like reading two stories about the same event?
  5. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from “perfect page-to-screen translation” to “loosely inspired by a feeling of 1973 Connecticut moral collapse with excellent production design,” where does The Ice Storm land? And the harder question: is Moody’s novel — ferocious, semi-autobiographical, metafictional, deliberately abrasive — a story whose best qualities are exactly the ones that couldn’t survive the adaptation process? Or did Lee and Schamus find, in their elegy, something the novel was reaching for but couldn’t quite achieve in prose?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your Connecticut.