Thanksgiving weekend in the Connecticut suburbs, 1973: Dad (Kevin Kline) is carrying on a bleak affair with a neighbor (Sigourney Weaver), while Mom (Joan Allen) flirts with kleptomania. Their son (Tobey Maguire, presciently obsessed with comic-book heroes) and daughter (Christina Ricci) suffer from their own erotic disappointments, the latter donning a Nixon mask for an attempted seduction of the boy next door. Ang Lee followed Sense and Sensibility with another kind of costume drama, a behavioral study that makes Watergate-era civilization seem both exotic and painfully familiar. The talented actors play out their dysfunctional family tragicomedy amid a meticulously assembled collection of period artifacts, creating an unsettling union of psychological drama and fashion flashback: which is more discomfiting in retrospect, sexual humiliation and emotional barrenness or waterbeds and crocheted vests?