Ice Castles
Reviewed by Gordon Kearns
Warning! This movie review reveals key plot elements (Spoilers!).
So ... I found out why I liked this film so much when it first came out twenty-five years ago: it was a good movie. Most reviewers followed the movie's publicity hype and assessed the movie on a linear structure: the story of a girl who with the help of her lover surmounts overwhelming obstacles to achieve an impossible dream. And I can see how they might, and how on such a basis they might view it as shallow. But then the linear structure was not the goal of the story in the first place. If you really look at what's happening in the movie, you'd have to re-define "impossible dream" before it makes any sense in the story that's actually told. In the end we don't even know how she places in the "big" come-back competition.
First, let's fill out the linear story of "Ice Castles." Alexis Winston, Lexie (Lynn-Holly Johnson), lives on a farm with her widowed father in prairie Iowa, near the small town of Waverly. Her interest in and natural talent for figure skating is encouraged by Beulah Smith (Colleen Dewhurst), a former regional champion who now owns a seen-better-days combination ice rink and bowling alley. Beulah is teaching Lexie from her own experience, grooming her for the coming regional championships. Lexie's boyfriend Nick (Robby Benson) is in and out of her life, trying to achieve for himself a career in professional hockey. When Beulah thinks she has Lexie sufficiently prepared for major competition, she, Nick, and Lexie herself pressure Lexie's father, Marcus (Tom Skerritt), into letting her enter. Lexie's skillful, but unpolished performance doesn't place her among the winners. But it does catch the eye of a major figure skating trainer, Deborah (Jennifer Warren), who proposes to take over Lexie's training and lead her into the national arena and hopefully the Olympics, which is only a couple years away. Against her father's strong resistance, it is agreed that Lexie give it a try. As part of the plan to get Lexie well enough known in the figure skating world to be even looked at by the judges, Deborah arranges for TV personality Brian Dockett (David Huffman) to build a continuing feature story around this farm girl, overage by figure skating standards, who has the courage and skill to make a run for a berth on the Olympic team. Things go very well for Lexie, and she achieves a surprising win at the sectionals, a major step to the national championships - and Olympics. However, on the night of her big victory, she imprudently skates on the hotel rink, and has a terrible fall in which she receives a severe head injury, which blinds her and ends her meteoric rise to fame. Later, with the help of her father and friends, having conquered the limitations of her blindness, she will return to the arena of the sectionals
Now for the true dimension of this gem of a movie. Grooming Lexie for the next Olympics is a major challenge for Deborah. Most girls start their trek by the time they're seven, learning the skills of competing and honing their muscles gradually over a decade or so before they're considered ready for the big time. At sixteen Lexie is considered by many to be already over the hill. Under Deborah's demanding turorship, Brian's television hype, and Lexie's determination and natural talent, amazing progress is made; sponsors are even lining up to back her run for the gold. What no one considers, least of all Deborah, is that skill isn't the only thing skaters become enured to by starting early on in competition. There's the give and take in the community of skaters, the learned knowledge of the ways of judging, the back-biting, the dog-eat-dog mentality that girls around the business since early childhood take for granted, but that for Lexie is a whole new world of naivete. In order to compensate for those years of rugged experience, a girl in Lexie's position will need to have strong props. Lexie's props? She's never been out of Waverly. Her mother is dead. Her father looks on Lexie as a surrogate for his dead wife, and refuses even to come to the bus depot to wish her well on her journey. Her beloved Nick leaves her at every important turning point in her life. Beulah is the only one who has ever treated Lexie with respect, but even she has an agenda. She wants desperately for Lexie, through her skating, to get away from the trap of small town America - which she herself was never able to do. So time after time we see a basically fragile Lexie totally confused by what she experiences in her new life. At a major Christmas television special in New York where all the world-recognized girl skaters will be putting on an exhibition, all the girls are stunned by the public emotional collapse on the ice of the French champion, but quickly get on to the next stage of the show; however, Lexie stands open-mouthed and frozen by what she has seen on the TV monitor. At the required cocktail receptions, Lexie doesn't understand why all the sponsors want to touch her and crowd her. It is not a hidden intention of the director and author that we should know that LEXIE HAS NO PROPS. When Nick is cold to her on the telephone, Brian takes advantage of the obviously vulnerable girl - but he is incapable of support; what he calls love, yes; but support? no. So when she reaches the height of her quest, the gold medal at the sectionals, and sees Nick coming towards her, she is for the moment in seventh heaven, but when he sees Brian hugging her, the guy who always walks away from a struggle turns his back on her - a door slam that Lexie is no longer able to cope with. Depressed and alone, she leaves the victory reception, goes to the hotel ice rink, and does the only thing she has confidence in for herself, she skates - and falls - and hurts her head - and is permanently blinded. Now she has nothing. She returns to the farm and vegetates. Even her father has reached the end of his self-centeredness, and confesses to Beulah that he doesn't know what to do, that Lexie will die if not checked on her nothing course. Most viewers of this movie think that the climax is the big moment, when, totally blind, she skates the best performance of her life. But in a surmount-all-obstacles kind of movie you're supposed to end up winning - or at least essentially tying, like Rocky. Here, not only do we not find out if she won or lost the competition, we're never even told her score. The actual turning point - climax, if you will - is when after Marcus' plea, Beulah looks for Lexie and finds that she has crawled to the attic, and in the dark there she is putting on her mother's clothes (shallow movie?). The ensuing sometimes violent confrontation is as down and rough dramatic as you'd want.
But Lexie decides to put on the skates again. This time Nick, who has also learned a lesson, is a true helpmate - not doing things for her, but encouraging her to do what she can do ... and not walking out on her. After a long arduous relearning period, Lexie goes again to the sectionals - this time with all her props in place: Beulah, Nick, and her father. The scene of the happy foursome in the car going to the sectionals could easily have been the last scene for its resolution of the story.
Ice Castles was directed by Donald Wrye.
It should be noted that Lynn-Holly Johnson, herself a world-class professional ice skater, did her own skating in this movie.
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