Surely one of the most deliberately paced films of the year, Ang Lee's The Ice Storm belongs to the school of filmmaking that has become almost extinct. After all, how do you market a sensitive and intelligent American film about unpleasant suburbanites and their children, circa 1973? How do you convince the cynical contemporary audience that they should care about these people?

Furthermore, The Ice Storm is an uncommonly cold drama, one that exposes our human failings in the light of day. It's not a moralistic film, or a fatalistic one -- in fact, you could argue that it's optimistic in the most profound way possible. But getting there is a rough journey.

James Schamus's well-wrought screenplay is based on the more acerbic novel of the same title by Rick Moody, who grew up in New Canaan and based his story around a storm that hit on Thanksgiving weekend, 1973, as remembered from his youth. It begins with a Metro-North railroad car isolated in a deep winter freeze, immobilized by the cold and without power. On board is Paul Hood (Tobey Maguire), reading a Fantastic Four comic book and en route to who knows where. Before too long, the train's fluorescent lights flicker on and the wheels start moving again, the worst of the storm apparently past. As he reads the comic, he starts to speak in voiceover about what it means to be part of a family.

Flashback. The movie zeroes in on two well-to-do families whose lives are intersecting in unsettling ways. On the one hand, Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is cheating on his wife, Elena (Joan Allen), one of those long-suffering suburban women who seem as proud and as fragile as a china doll. He's having one of those insufferably sophisticated affairs with neighbor Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver). I describe it as "insufferably sophisticated" because it's almost impossible to tell what these two people see in one another -- except perhaps a sort of fun-house reflection of themselves. They mope around the bedroom in between respectably energetic bouts of sex, with Ben boring Janey and Janey treating him like the empty husk that he seems to have become.

If this sounds a little familiar -- like, uh-oh, one of those stories -- it's probably because you've read some Updike or Cheever in your time. (Moody has been compared to both authors, only he's a little, well, scruffier.) More dynamic are the sex games indulged in, in parallel, by the children of both families. Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) is a cynical 14-year-old who manipulates Jim and Mikey Carver (Jamey Sheridan and Elijah Wood) out of spite as much as curiosity. And her brother, Paul (whom we've met), has his own designs on Libbets Casey (Katie Holmes) a well-off New York girl he met in boarding school.

The titular storm, which hits the neighborhood on a fateful Thanksgiving night, is the locus around which, we understand, everything now revolves. As the cold and the ice settle in, Ben and Elena find themselves at a "key party" — the men drop their car keys into a bowl, for the women to draw at random at the end of the evening. (The women go home with the owner of the keys.) Fresh from discovering Ben's trysts with Janey, an angry and bitter Elena insists that she and Ben play along. Meanwhile, Paul is in Manhattan trying to figure out a way to have some quality time with Libbetts. Wendy is out to seduce Jim Carver. And Mikey is out in the storm, searching for a revelation to call his own.

If it sounds like you'll hate it, maybe you will. None of this material is particularly compelling on its own. (Lee says he excised some of the comedy from the film after test screenings didn't go well, and maybe this has thrown the film off balance.) I found Kline to be (contrary to popular opinion) self-consciously wooden and generally unfocused, while Weaver is given so little to do you can't tell whether she got a bead on her character or not. Allen is absolutely fine, as usual, in her portrait of a woman who's cracking under emotional strain. The younger ensemble, by contrast, is absolutely top-drawer. Ricci has the showcase role and rises impressively to the occasion, but all of these kids are terrific.

Lee's camera draws little attention to itself, but it is inquisitive, and it's often in motion. As in Sense and Sensibility, the viewer's feeling is very much one of being a spectator, rather than any kind of participant in the drama. Perhaps that's just as well, since it insulates us from some third-act action that verges on melodrama but still plays a pivotal role in the story. Lee knows exactly where to place us in relation to this disaster, and never lets us get too close.

To that end, the metaphor of the storm itself is brilliant, in a very literary way. Here is a turbulence manifested not in thunder and wind and a rumbling subwoofer, but in layer upon layer of smooth and shiny glass. It has a chilly, crystalline beauty. It suggests not so much a violence, but a more alienating freeze that could, perhaps, have been sensed beforehand -- just as, drawing our coats more tightly around us, we notice the harsh arrival of the first winter chill, the pin-prick presence of moisture in frigid air, or the smell of rain. (The storm gets a big assist in the portent department from Mychael Danna's typically beguiling score.)

Even more inspired may be the dip into the pop mythology of the Fantastic Four, finding an allegory for the family bond somewhere in the "negative zone" of those comic book stories. You get the sense early on that the film doesn't resort to comic books and television programs simply to convey a sense of place. They're tied inextricably into the events unfolding.

Near the very end of The Ice Storm, we realize that we've come full circle -- we once again find Paul Hood on that train. But we're gorged this time on the knowledge of all that has transpired. A master of isolating a moment amid its context, Lee makes these same scenes take on a previously unfathomable dimension. It's one of the best narrative gimmicks I've seen all year. As Paul's train pulled into the station, I nearly cried. For all its shortcomings, the film coalesces in this single moment of almost miraculous silence, empathy and universality. The Ice Storm cuts to the quick of that thing called family, and ably demonstrates why we hold so tight to it. Even more, it recognizes our needs and our weaknesses, as well as the price that we will pay for indulging them, but remembers that there may still come a moment when we clamber out of our own ruin.