Boogie Nights.

TWO of the most highly touted movies at the recent New York Film Festival were The Ice Storm and Boogie Nights; I don't know which I disliked more. Seeming opposites, the former is about upper-middle-class lives of quiet desperation in New Canaan, Connecticut; the latter, about making pornographic movies in the San Fernando Valley during the late Seventies and early Eighties. Yet they have something in common: neither of them knows how to get inside its characters, however much it moans or moons about them.

The Ice Storm is based on a novel by Rick Moody that, on casual leafing through, seems more interesting than the film, but not much so. The screenplay is by James Schamus -- a producer/ screenwriter/film teacher at Columbia University -- who has here dreamed up scenes that make no sense. Take the one wherein a girl apparently about to deliver oral sex to a youth passes out from a pill she took. He just sits and sits there for ages with her head between his knees. Then he finally gets up and goes home.

Even the eponymous ice storm is made to look preposterous, what with rime covering everything in bluish-silvery splendor, like a Disney wonderland. Or take a "key party," where jaded wives pick car keys from a bowl at evening's end and go off to bed down with whichever equally jaded husband the keys belong to. The movie doesn't know whether to play this for comedy, shock value, or pathos, and manages to flub them all.

Ang Lee, the Taiwan-born director, showed nice comic sense in his Taiwanese-American trilogy, and did remarkably well by the quite different Sense and Sensibility. But this story, these people, seem totally alien to him, and none of them comes to palpable life. Thus the superb Joan Allen, playing the hero's cheated-on wife, walks through the film like a zombie, giving her only poor performance in a career of nothing but winners, even in such inferior movies as Nixon and The Crucible. That, surely, is both the scenarist's and the director's fault. And the gifted Kevin Kline, as her gallivanting husband, makes an uncharacteristically flat showing, while as the object of his dalliance, his best friend's icy wife, the good Sigourney Weaver carries on like a silent-movie vamp.

Poorly cast, too, are the suffering children. As a charming but disturbed teenager, Christina Ricci, fine as a tiny tot in silly movies, has turned into a graceless young girl. As another confused youngster, Adam Hann-Byrd is so grotesque looking as to elicit involuntary laughter. Add to this the garish cinematography of the hugely esteemed -- and to my view coarse and inept -- Frederick Elmes; also weirdly inapposite, gamelan-style music by the pretentious Mychael [sic] Danna; and, finally, insufferable, dragged-in sentimentality. Ugh!

Boogie Nights is a somewhat more complicated failure. To make a film about the porn-film industry requires tact and skill beyond the reach of the young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, or P.T., as he likes to call himself. He has to some extent managed to avoid sensationalism, which is fine, but not enough. At the press conference following the screening, his every sentence was liberally sprinkled with "you know"s and "I don't know"s until he convinced me that I know, and he hasn't a clue.

What, in any case, does a 26-year-old director know about conditions from 1977 to 1984, with which he purports to be familiar? More important, what is his purpose in making such a film? If purely to titillate, I could, without commending it, understand it. However, he claims to have a higher goal: to show a moment in history when porn-movie makers thought they were on to an important new genre. Did they ever think that? Further, P.T. says: "These characters are all searching for their dignity. They're just trying to find themselves." If so, they are looking in mighty odd places, and not very hard.

Eddie Adams, the juvenile lead, is a restless youth at odds with his stridently carping mother; he is working as a busboy at a questionable Vegas joint where Jack Horner, the noted porn director, likes to hang out. Horner spots Eddie as a likely Candide for the sort of porn film in which a naive young person is schooled in all the ways and byways of sex. And when Eddie exhibits a penis of epochal dimensions (not to us in the audience -- that comes as the film's climax after more than two and a half hours), his career is clinched. He picks the nom de -- nom de what, exactly? -- Dirk Diggler, and is promptly astounding all and sundry on the set with his particular version of the one talent that, as he says, everyone possesses.

He is, as it were, adopted by Jack Horner and the porn star Amber Waves, who lives with Jack. What is Jack and Amber's relationship? Unanswered. What is Jack's sexuality? Unanswered. There is a suggestion that he may be asexual; but then why is he in this profession? Unanswered. Why isn't more made of Amber's attempts to regain her real son from her former husband? This subplot, like so many others kicking around, pops up whenever it suits P.T., and then not very persuasively. When Amber is up for a custody hearing, she, unlike her ex, does not bring a lawyer. Why? We see Eddie's initiation into sex with the company ingenue, a high-school dropout who calls herself Rollergirl and never takes off her skates, not even during intercourse. What is her story? The film is uninterested in motivation.

On Horner's team, there are endless colorful characters. Thus Little Bill, an assistant director, whose wife (played by Nina Hartley, an actual porn star and technical advisor on the film) flagrantly cheats on him in ways such that Bill must always catch her in flagrante delicto. But if he is a perfect masochist, as he must be, how does he at long last summon strength for vengeance? There are several black performers in the Horner stable; why are they never shown in sexual action? A whole elaborate subplot, which takes bizarre and irrelevant turns, concerns one of them, Buck Swope, a fellow who keeps changing costumes -- which also remains unexplored.

P.T. drags in whatever he can think of. Thus the fat, homely male production assistant who develops an uncontrollable crush on Dirk. Thus an episode where Dirk, separated from his movie family, ends up as a male hustler beaten up by fag-bashers. Thus another episode where Dirk gets involved in the drug trade, with devastating results. Always there is a gaudy mixture of the smartass, the grotesque, and the bloodcurdling, as if P.T.'s chief aim were to outbid Quentin Tarantino -- which, worse luck, it may be. But when Boogie Nights is on to something truly interesting, such as the curiously ambiguous relationship between Amber and Dirk -- part mother and adopted son, part loving mistress and ardent young lover, part cynical fellow porn actors -- the film fails to look more deeply.

Instead, we are off on more subplots: the cornball action movies that Dirk and a sidekick, in rebellion from Horner, make unsuccessfully; the porn-movie producer who lands in jail for child molestation; another producer, who vainly tries to make Horner & Co. switch from using film to using more cost-efficient video; the comical Hispanic who desperately wants to act in porn movies; and many more. What makes this overlong movie bearable is the fine performances.

Burt Reynolds, with probably a sense of his own manifold frustrations, infuses Jack with more than is in the screenplay. Julianne Moore, sweetly sexy, brings warmth and humanity to Amber. As Dirk, Mark Wahlberg (a/k/a Marky Mark, the former rapper and unwrapped Calvin Klein model) shuttles believably between befuddlement and cockiness. A large supporting cast contributes gamely. But nothing, not even careful period detail, can endow Boogie Nights with a sense of purpose -- least of all the unearnedly cheerful final sequences.