The Big Chill is, though, first and foremost a comedy, despite the fact that it is predicated on a suicide. And not just any suicide, but the dramatic wrist-slitting of the group’s central member, a man named Alex who initially drew them all together as students at the University of Michigan (the writer/director’s alma mater) but was unable to find any kind of happiness or sense of place in his post-collegiate life. Much of the film’s dialogue revolves around the various characters discussing Alex and what he meant to them, although we never actually see him aside from close-ups during the film’s opening credits while his corpse is dressed for his funeral (the hiding of the fact that he is a corpse until the last-minute reveal of his wrist sutures is a bit of queasy visual gag).

The funeral takes place in a picturesque small town in South Carolina, which is also the location of a vacation home owned by Harold and Sarah Cooper (Kevin Kline and Glenn Close), the only members of the group who married each other. Harold has made big bucks with a running shoe company and Sarah is a doctor, so they are awash in material comfort, something for which Harold refuses to apologize. Their large, palatial vacation house becomes the film’s primary setting, as the out-of-town friends who arrive for the funeral end up staying the weekend, drawn by their desire to reunite with their old friends, rehash old arguments, and reminisce about the good ol’ days (forgetting, of course, that those were days of turbulence and violence and discontent). There is sense of joy in being together again, but it also reminds them of what they have given up and how they are no longer the people they once were.

Thus, each character represents some facet of contemporary complacency, and each is shallow in a way that represents the betrayal of something potentially noble. The most shallow character (and also, by the way, the funniest) is Jeff Goldblum’s Michael Gold, who has sold out the call of journalism—that watchdog institution that helped reveal to the American public the horrors of Vietnam and forced Nixon out of office—to become a hack writer for People magazine. The unhappiest of the group are Meg Jones (Mary Kay Place’s), who left her underpaid position as a legal aid helping the down-and-out for corporate law, and Karen Bowens (JoBeth Williams), who married a dull, by-the-book advertising executive whom she is already planning to leave. Sam Weber (Tom Berenger) is a Tom Selleck-esque television star who headlines a cheesy action series, a clear betrayal of the art of acting and theater. That leaves only William Hurt’s Nick Carlton, a veteran of Vietnam who has many internal scars and makes his living dealing drugs, mostly to himself, thus representing that banality of being constantly stoned, rather than the late-’60s mind-altering, mind-expanding ethos of drug experimentation. The film’s final character, Chloe (Meg Tilly), is an outsider, a member of the next generation who was living with Alex when he killed himself. The fact that she is wide-eyed but almost entirely devoid of any ideas or nostalgia (“I don’t like talking about the past as much as you guys do,” she says at point) suggests that Kasdan sees the then-current generation as a new kind of failure—one that doesn’t lose its ideals because it didn’t have any to begin with, although she at least has the virtue of blunt honesty.

As written by Kasdan and television writer Barbara Benedek, The Big Chill has a number of great character moments surrounded by a lot of unrewarding self-examination and rumination. The characters aren’t insufferable by any means (the actors are too good to let that happen), but they’re not particularly engaging either, except in their symbolic capacities. The group scenes tend to be the best, as Kasdan displays a real flair for directing his ensemble cast and keeping the energy up without getting messy. Throughout the film various characters pair off and have “revealing” moments, which also tend to be the worst, if only because they are so telegraphed and obvious. Kasdan and Benedek also weave through a subplot involving Meg, who is the very portrait of dissatisfaction, trying to sleep with each of the men in the group because she hears her biological clock ticking and wants to have a baby. The eventual resolution of this issue has a certain logic to it given that the characters come from the era of the sexual revolution, but it still feels both creepy and a bit pat in the way it turns conventional sexual morality on its head.

Although it doesn’t work all that well as a film, The Big Chill is notable for its incredible soundtrack, which assembled some of the greatest rock and R&B hits of the mid- to late 1960s, many of which were ripe for rediscovery in the pre-digital early ’80s: Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” Aretha Franklin’s “A Natural Woman,” Smokey Robinson’s “I Second That Emotion,” and so on (although, come to think of it, the soundtrack may have helped lead to commercial appropriation of Motown, as many of these songs were then recycled for ad campaigns ranging from California raisins to Jordache jeans). Kasdan deploys the songs in various ways throughout the film, and he should be commended for not falling into the trap of trying to use them to comment directly on the action. Rather, he seems to have chosen them primarily for their mood and their energy, which seeps into the various scenes and gives them more kick than they otherwise would have. Even if the film isn’t timeless, the soundtrack certainly is.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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