‘The Big Chill,’ 30 years later
Some movies are born significant, some achieve significance, and some have significance thrust upon them – not always in the way their makers would have wished.
An intended lament for the death of the hippie, “The Big Chill” (1983), directed and written (with Barbara Benedek) by Lawrence Kasdan, celebrated the birth of the yuppie instead.
Kasdan’s film, now out in a dual edition from Criterion, concerns a group of college friends (University of Michigan ’70, like him) who come together a dozen years after graduation to mourn the suicide of their erstwhile comrade Alex, a brilliant ne’er-do-well whose death represents the end of the 1960s or youthful idealism or simply youth itself. He was, as somebody says at the funeral that opens the movie, “too good for this world.”
Over the course of a long weekend, the seven voluble friends (Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place and JoBeth Williams), along with Alex’s younger girlfriend (Meg Tilly), come together to bemoan their respective accommodations to life, wonder if their unspecified commitment was only fashion, pair off (or not), wistfully smoke weed and prance around the kitchen of Close and Kline’s sumptuous suburban South Carolina house to the joyous strains of the Temptations singing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”
“The Big Chill” caught the spirit of the age. Materializing 2 1/2 years into the Reagan era, the movie was an idea whose time had clearly come. That it opened both the Toronto and New York Film Festivals is worth noting in view of the current competition between festivals; as a member of the New York festival selection committee that year, I can attest to how anxious the festival was to have it, even over my own metaphoric dead body.
Dave Kehr, who reviewed “The Big Chill” in Chicago Reader, called it “a slickly engineered complacency machine.” The word “machine” is apt. Like the first film Kasdan directed, the 1981 neo-noir “Body Heat,” “The Big Chill” was something of a pastiche, popularizing the premise of John Sayles’ 1980 independent feature, “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” while borrowing the war-wounded character played by Hurt from Hemingway’s Lost Generation novel “The Sun Also Rises.”
The ensemble had a sitcom slickness. Reporting from Toronto in the New York Post, Rex Reed quoted an anonymous Canadian critic who joked that the movie’s characters were “all the same person – they all sound like they’ll go back to Hollywood and write ‘Return of the Jedi.’”
Kasdan was a co-writer of “Return of the Jedi,” as well as “The Empire Strikes Back,” but the George Lucas movie that “The Big Chill” most closely resembles is “American Graffiti.” The soundtrack of what was not yet known as classic rock is an even more Pavlovian substitute for feeling than Lucas’ selection of golden oldies.
The trade press found the success of the “Big Chill” soundtrack album an even bigger surprise than the movie’s considerable popularity. (It was the year’s 13th top-grossing movie and Columbia’s biggest hit.) The most innovative aspect of the movie’s marketing was a music video in which clips from the movie were scored to Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
Big chill or warm bath? Originally meant to evoke a cold shiver of mortality, the movie’s title came to signify a nostalgic baby boomer reunion for a generational game of Trivial Pursuit. Criterion’s extras include one such get-together, a cast-and-crew celebration of the movie’s 30th anniversary. There is also a droll essay by Lena Dunham, herself the voice of a generation, that analyzes the movie without mentioning it (or at least without naming it), from the perspective of someone born in the 1980s.
Unfortunately missing is the revered flashback epilogue – cut during previews – that showed the Chillsters as the flower children they were in 1970, with a long-haired Kevin Costner as Alex. (He’d get to wear his fringes and beads a few years later in “Dances With Wolves.”)
“The Big Chill” was not a tale of failure but success. Conceived in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, the movie anticipated the ascension of Bill Clinton. In 1996, a New York Times article on Clinton’s 50th-birthday party began by noting that the president “led his generation into its sixth decade last night with the ultimate in boomer birthday bashes: a Radio City fundraising extravaganza of self-celebration and reflection drenched with more Top-40 nostalgia than ‘The Big Chill.’ ”