`ICE STORM,' `BOOGIE NIGHTS' SIMPLIFY '70S AS ERA OF EXCESS.

Byline: Charles Ealy Dallas Morning News

At a suburban Connecticut party, the women line up on one side of the room, the men on the other. Both groups fidget; their eyes dart to a bowl and then back to each other. Each woman will pluck a set of keys from the bowl to choose her sex partner for the evening. Some relish the prospect; others recoil. But all have decided to spouse-swap in the climactic scene of ``The Ice Storm,'' a bitterly cold tale of sexual desperation in the '70s.

At a steamy disco in the San Fernando Valley, meanwhile, a freshly minted porn star dances the night away in tacky splendor. He's had sex with - or in front of - most of the people on the dance floor, and he's genuinely genial about dropping his pants for a buck. He's the key player in ``Boogie Nights,'' a sleazy chronicle of the '70s heyday of porn.

With two new movies, the glum ``Ice Storm'' and the gleeful ``Boogie Nights,'' Hollywood is making a nostalgia-drenched reappraisal of the sexual revolution and the decade that saw its zenith.

Get ready for more. The upcoming ``54'' will chronicle the sex- and cocaine-fueled rise and fall of Manhattan's legendary disco Studio 54. Quentin Tarantino is reaching back to ``blaxploitation'' sex symbol Pam Grier to anchor his long-awaited ``Jackie Brown,'' due in December. And publishers are reissuing the novels of Jacqueline Susann, that poodle-hugging trash-fiction queen whose death in the '70s helped inspire a frenzy of imitators.

``This new nostalgia is looking back at a time when all of us were told that we could throw away the old morality,'' says Michael Pounds, 44, a film professor at California State University, Long Beach. ``Of course, most of us didn't throw it away. But there's a nostalgia for lost possibilities, for sexual freedom.''

Two decades of Eden

That's no surprise to Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder who built an empire by quenching America's sudden sexual thirst. ``The '70s were a swinging time,'' he says. ``And if you include the '60s, you almost have two decades of Eden - before the arrival of AIDS.''

That kind of nostalgia will wash over more and more writers and directors, predicts Louis Giannetti, author of Understanding Movies and a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. ``If you're making a film that deals with fundamental change in basic values like sexuality, family, the role of the female, then the '70s will be the period of choice,'' he says.

It doesn't really matter whether it was truly a time of sexual abandon, he adds. ``Certain aspects of an age capture the popular imagination, enter the mythology and gain the status of fact.''

So far, no one is trying to debunk that '70s myth. The decade saw the women's rights movement rock the nation, gay liberation make gains and sexual alternatives proliferate. President Jimmy Carter admitted to ``lusting in his heart.'' Playboy and Penthouse became two of the top five best-selling magazines in the nation. And the Centers for Disease Control reported an alarming increase in the spread of venereal disease.

But the unanimity about the '70s ends where discussions about values begin. As ``The Ice Storm'' and ``Boogie Nights'' show, there's no agreement on whether the sexual revolt in the '70s was good or bad. ``The Ice Storm'' shrinks from it, while ``Boogie Nights'' revels, at least until the '80s hangover hits. The two approaches reveal a deeper split over the nation's cultural past - over a brief moment that defies easy assessment.

Director Ang Lee, 43, sees the '70s as grim and gray in ``The Ice Storm,'' a cautionary tale about the destructiveness of infidelity.

The story centers on Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) and their pretensions of family togetherness during Thanksgiving 1973. In reality, Ben is sleeping with neighbor Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), while Elena fumes.

The marriage may be on the rocks, but the adultery isn't faring much better. Ben and Janey aren't passionate. In bed, when he chatters about work, she cuts him off with a deadpan chill: ``I have a husband. I don't particularly feel the need for another.''

Looking to take charge

Like ``The Graduate's'' Mrs. Robinson, she's the ultimate bored suburbanite, looking to take charge of her sex life and seize the mantle of liberation. But she can't.

Nothing's working at the national level, either. The latest news about the Watergate scandal hums away on TV. A Nixon mask is the latest craze that Halloween.

``It was a quite peculiar year,'' Lee says. ``It's a pivotal year of changing from that older order of the past to the future. So I asked (screenwriter) James Schamus, `If you had to narrow it down to one word, what would you say?' ''

``Embarrassment,'' he replied.

And if you're looking for another one-word description, Lee would add ``adolescent.'' Ben seems to be the most adolescent of them all - even more than his teen-age kids.

``He was raised in the serious world of the '50s and didn't quite know how to adjust to the new social ideas,'' the director says. ``That's adolescent on top of embarrassment. ... And the nation experienced that. It's a coming-of-age story, in short.''

But it's definitely not a successful coming-of-age. Neither the men nor the women of ``The Ice Storm'' have the foggiest notion of liberation, as the climactic party scene reveals.

Women take charge of the evening. They gather the keys. They select from the bowl. But this power shift, this crack in tradition and marriage, seems like an assault upon nature in the movie's metaphorical landscape. A chill descends upon the final strands of affection between husband and wife, a storm rages beyond the windows, and a tragedy lurks as the ice rains down.

Sex has never been so cold.

Fast-forward four years, head for the West Coast and meet a waifish hunk with a big talent who just happens to come of age during the porno boom of the 1970s.

Welcome to the world of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), the central figure of director Paul Thomas Anderson's ``Boogie Nights.''

There's no confusion about sexual roles here. You can skip the metaphors, too. Sex is easy. Sex is good. No ifs, ands or buts about it.

It's enough to keep you glued to your seat - or make you walk out. And it's enough to make Variety wonder how this R-rated carnal carnival escaped a more stringent NC-17 label.

A review in the New Yorker - that bastion of intellectual acuity - reflects the instinctual need for critical distance. But the critic ends up in a full embrace. ``I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much I liked `Boogie Nights,' '' a sheepish Daphne Merkin writes.

As the acclaim rolls in, Anderson, 27, is taking an ``aw-shucks'' stance. All he's done is make a movie about porn, he says. The film speaks for itself.

And the message comes through loud and clear: Dirk is the ultimate phallic symbol. Get naked, have sex and let the world watch.

You may even join a bizarre sort of family along the way. There's Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), the local porn patriarch and substitute dad; Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), the den-motherish skin-flick queen; and Rollergirl, the innocent-looking sexpot who sheds everything but her skates.

Hitting rock bottom

The only threat to family togetherness seems to be cocaine. And by the '80s, it takes hold with a vengeance. As Dirk snorts and snorts, he starts falling and falling, until he deserts his new family and hits rock bottom as a gay prostitute.

The only hope for salvation is to find a way back home and become the ``family's'' repentant prodigal son. In Hollywood shorthand, it's porn industry meets the Old Testament.

The pairing of ``The Ice Storm'' and ``Boogie Nights'' paints a curious portrait of life in the '70s. The sexual revolution may be in full swing, but no one seems satisfied.

The adults of ``The Ice Storm'' ought to be happy. They have the trappings of success, the big home, the new car, the freshly scrubbed kids. But they want more sex. They read about it, courtesy of Philip Roth. They chat about it, thanks to Linda Lovelace of ``Deep Throat.'' And they're ready to do it, regardless of the consequences.

The denizens of ``Boogie Nights,'' meanwhile, want what the people in ``The Ice Storm'' already have. They dream about settling down, buying a car, building a home. There's no need to dream about sex. It's just a living.

Hollywood has long assumed we can identify with ``The Ice Storm's'' troubles. In fact, ``Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice'' took us down a similar path in 1969. But Hollywood never has assumed we could identify with the folks in ``Boogie Nights.''

``It's the first time Hollywood has ever made people in the porn industry seem human,'' says James R. Petersen, a senior writer at Playboy who's compiling a cultural history of the sexual revolution.

``Boogie Nights'' takes a major step in the opposite direction, he says. ``The real triumph of this 27-year-old director's film is that these people don't fit the stereotypes,'' he says.

``It's remarkable,'' adds Hefner, who recently screened the movie at his mansion with Anderson and Wahlberg. ``Anderson delineates the complexity of his characters with simple strokes, and he treats these people with great sympathy.''

But others think Middle America won't dance to ``Boogie Nights.''

``My visceral disgust with pornography kept me from fully empathizing with these characters and their humanity,'' says Rod Dreher, film critic for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and for the Catholic monthly Crisis. ``I couldn't see the characters as anything more than sad and pathetic. I doubt that the mass audience will have much of an interest in entering the milieu of pornography.''

If so, it won't be the first time. ``The People vs. Larry Flynt'' collected critical raves and Oscar nominations last winter, but the saga of the Hustler publisher sagged at the box office. Petersen doubts that Hollywood is ready to fully embrace the porn world.

``As far as sex is concerned, Hollywood's approach has been consistent: Scare early, scare often. For every sexual advance, there's always a reaction.''

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Photo

Photo: With films such as ``Boogie Nights,'' starring Mark Wahlberg, center, Hollywood is making a nostalgia-drenched reappraisal of the sexual revolution and the '70s, the decade that saw its zenith.