This eulogy for boomer idealism is to test it against the hard fact of Alex's suicide. The title sequence is a montage of the friends travelling to the funeral while a body is being dressed for the coffin. There's a strange slyness to this. At first we see trousers pulled over legs, neckties fastened as though the person is dressing himself. A few shots later we understand that it is a corpse and the last shot in the sequence is of a shirt cuff being pulled over three stitched slashes on the wrist. Over this is played Marvin Gaye's magnificent version of Heard it Through the Grapevine which adds a solemn and spooky ambience to visuals that are often cheeky or humorous. I said it was strange.
As we meet them at the funeral service we get used to dialogue packed with one-liners from a small number of sharp minded thirty-somethings and a sense of how far they have diverged from their glory days in the good fight. Meg the lawyer quit legal-aid to represent corporate interests as "they were only raping the land". Karen who could never make up her mind about Nick or Sam landed in a flavourless marriage to a man she would have called square at twenty. Hunky Sam got into acting and is now a TV star in a Magnum PI style show. Nick, the druggy one, now deals and the beaten up state of his Porsche speaks volumes. Michael ditched his great American novel to write articles that have to be no longer "than it takes your average person to take the average crap." Harold and Sarah got married. He's in business (a shoe shop called Running Dog!) and she's a doctor. The house everyone's staying at is theirs and its big enough to accommodate them all.
Care was taken to prevent this becoming a kind of pageant of sins or virtues, taking more the flow of the differences wrought by the decade between the '60s and the '80s. Nixon then but Reagan now, from the MC5 to Billy Joel (American mainstream culture always felt awkward around punk), from Easy Rider to Kramer vs Kramer, some progress and some stagnation. When Michael who struggles with the reality of his aging complains about the oldies Harold keeps putting on the turntable he gets rebuffed immediately. They all still dig the big football game and play in the yard at half time and the old days anecdotes flow as freely as the Chardonay, but this is not a story about old cronies singing the great numbers, it's a story about the effects of enforced self-reflection. All of these people have grown accustomed to their choices and are happy enough until wrenched out of their tanks and exposed. The results of this and their flow on effects form the drivers of the narrative.
The one character I haven't mentioned yet is Chloe. Chloe is the twenty something girlfriend of Alex. She's more hippy dippy than you'd expect if you were stereotyping an early '80s kid but her attraction to Alex makes more sense if she's like that. While Meg Tilly's committed performance takes the character into the kind of spacey entitlement more typical of characterisations of millennials if provides a strong push back to all the nostalgia guilt around her. She is at the other end of Alex's pendulum, a sprite of the current day, unweighed by sentimentality, and it is she who delivers the truth in a single line that unravels the idolatry of Alex practiced by the others. She provides the point of departure by which they must stay or fly free. The results are sobering.
On nostalgia, one of the features of this film that got people talking as much as the story and performances is the needle drop score. Late '60s hits burst out of the speakers like a golden oldies station. They might set a scene, garnish a montage, render a line of dialogue ironic; it is one of the most energetic and hard working examples of a trope begun in the '60s with the likes of Easy Rider. From The Stones requiem for the decade You Can't Always Get Want You Want at the funeral, to the Temptations' Aint Too Proud to Beg over the washing up scene that was copied in everything in the '80s from feature films to softdrink commercials, every song is chosen for lyrical content, tone, mood etc in a way that both points to the sentimentality and indulges in it. There's even a cover version in the prologue scene as Harold and Sarah's toddler is singing a Three Dog Night song in the bath. It works so well in this film that it dominated mainstream cinema for over a decade.
The cast includes names that came to dominate the '80s and in some cases go well beyond them. Glen Close brings her intimidating Earth Mother powers. Kevin Kline charms the way he would in everything, playing a polished version of himself. William Hurt's Nick travels the largest arc from directionless but loveable neerdowell to Alex's effective replacement. Tom Berenger could not have been better cast as Sam, the Tom Selleck style TV hero who, here, has a ball undercutting the Hollywood overconfidence when Sam finds himself overwhelmed by the words and deeds of everyday people. Jeff Goldblum is having a ball as the constantly horny Michael with the million deadpan quips (as well he might as that's exactly how he's been acting ever since). As noted previously, Meg Tilly as Chloe seems to have fallen from the ether as the razorsharp naif. She would continue to be cast as wide-eyed psychos for the balance of her career. The most central character of Alex was cast and included in scenes, played by a young Kevin Costner. All we see of him is the corpse being dressed at the beginning (which doesn't include a single shot of his face). Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan has wisely never released Costner's scenes as extras nor included them in any altered cut of the film, knowing to leave well enough alone. Here's to him.
This was a credible hit on release but I first really knew it as a peculiarly localised cult film. When I moved down to Melbourne from Brisbane my flatmate (and uni friend) moved among student politics circles and one house among them played this movie like a favourite album and could quote it line by line. It was like a pastel toned Rocky Horror Picture Show interactive screening except it was on VHS. It wasn't hard to see the appeal. This was the mid '80s and the last big push of student activism in Australia before Universities became harder to go to and increasingly squeezed out any but the most career orientated courses, producing a kind of sausage factory of corporate fast talking goofballs (can you guess my politics?) and these lawyers, doctors and senators to be were looking down the barrel of their own thirties (never mind middle age) and silently vowing never to turn out like that. The big idealist of the story is, after all, being suited up for a funeral at the beginning.
Should this be attempted for generations beyond? A Gen X one to carry on directly from this which would cede the floor to a millennial one etc? I wonder if the principles would be all that different to warrant it? I'm trying to think of a cute kitchen scene in the early '80s with Throbbing Gristle's Slug Bait bashing out of the sound system. Yeah, bad idea.
I am now of an age I cold not imagine being when I was a twenty year old university student. While it was and is a chore to imagine the angst of '60s warriors growing into their sellout lives, it's not hard to care for them. I still feel the problem here of the movie itself suggesting that lifelong care about politics, environment and anything that fires up youth must inevitably be discarded as youthful naivete. I don't think the film is forcing that read but it is there for the reading. Indulging in some black and white thinking, I can't see an alternative involving these people suddenly taking up the old banners after the revelations of this weekend. Their responses are subtle and, realistically, not of even effect.
Few I knew from my student days have done what they dreamed of. Almost none, self included. By the same token I don't know of any who have changed their politics in the way these characters did. If anything, I stand further left of the leftism that I started developing while at university and don't expect to change that at all for the remainder of my years. So, it's not a feat to forgive these characters in a fiction for lives reversed for the purposes of growing up and keeping the chill out. However, I still want to throttle some of them at least for apologies that involve disowning their ideals. I know, it's fiction and it just works better if they do that but, crikey, those ideals aren't like old lego, they can help you make the good choices. So, ok, maybe The Big Chill does have more to say to us now than it did to its lightly aged boomers in the first place. For that, I'll rate it. And it's fun.
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