Ben is back

Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz returns to the Virginia Film Festival to discuss director Ang Lee’s 1997 drama The Ice Storm, and to introduce The Sting at a Robert Redford tribute screening. Set during the holiday season in 1973, The Ice Storm examines the tangled relationships of two generations of suburbanites grappling with every­thing from extramarital affairs to Watergate. Mankiewicz, who is based in Los Angeles, has been with TCM for 22 years (he flies to Atlanta to tape his movie intros and outros), and he also hosts TCM’s podcast “The Plot Thickens.” Fresh from the latest TCM cruise, he spoke with C-VILLE via Zoom.

C-VILLE: What’s your take on The Ice Storm?

Ben Mankiewicz: I mean, it’s a movie that doesn’t feel like it would be a movie today, and that’s a shame. Because it’s about—what’s the word I’m looking for?—oh, yeah, people. These people you could have known, and even if you don’t relate to them specifically, in the hands of James [Schamus] and Ang Lee, there is a real recognizable humanity.

In some of the bigger movies that get the big budgets and get the billboards, I just don’t feel that. There’s not an emotional connection to it. Whereas here, there’s an emotional connection to six or seven different characters, people who are going through some degree of pain, or loss, or dissatisfaction, or joy, even … but mostly pain, loss, and dissatisfaction. You can connect with that, and that’s what great storytelling is.

The cast is beyond belief: Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen. Tobey Maguire, and Christina Ricci and Katie Holmes, when they were starting out. And it so perfectly captures the atmosphere of 1973, the political and social upheavals.

As a history major, I used to say, “Imagine what it must have been like to live through the ’60s, to live through the JFK assassination in ’63, and then Malcolm X in ’65, and then Doctor King and Bobby Kennedy in ’68. Like, that’s five years, less than five years between these four cataclysmic assassinations, plus all this other social unrest. Can you imagine living through those times?” And now I can answer, “Yes.” We’ve lived through tumultuous times. And I now can imagine. And I am unnerved. I feel unsettled almost every day, in ways that affect my mood and how I deal with people I love. So, yeah, I get it. It makes me relate to characters like this.

It’s great to have you back for the festival.

I think everybody loves college towns. And I don’t think there’s a better one than Charlottesville, which is a great place. I love it there.
The Ice Storm 10/25, Violet Crown 5 and The Sting 10/26, Violet Crown 5