The Big Chill

POP PSALMODY

Baby boomers ecstatically gobbled up Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill as a healing, Utopian modus vivendi. The title the threat of mortality but Kasdan’s “chill” is the sentimental re-discovery of friendship. Because the movie’s stacked in its favor, avoiding as much as possible the suicide of an unseen tho beloved bff and the 60s politics that brought these friends together in the first place, there have been charges of phoniness, especially from what’s left of the Chicago Seven crowd. But the movie’s not for them: it isn’t castigating the principals about easing up on idealism, it doesn’t condemn reworked values or the absorption of and profiteering from consumerism. Romanticized compassion is what The Big Chill advertises—pitching “If you’re okay, I’m okay.” The script’s so pregnant with “love” it’s a pop psalmody of shvoogie-boogie anthems such as “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Second That Emotion,” “In the Midnight Hour,” and as counter-balance the Spencer Davis blasto profundo “Gimme Some Lovin.” It’s a movie admitting we boomers haven’t but mildly curbed drug cravings, cajoling us to do comfy things for one another, like dropping illegal stock tips, dispensing joggers, providing babymaking services. Egalitarian mates with “fashionable” priorities and commitments, Kevin Kline and Glenn Close, as the only marriage within the circle, start off a little shaky: Kline is short on groundwork to attempt a teary eulogy and still retains choreographic bounce from The Pirates of Penzance (given a nod when charging off with a tennis racket in hand to battle an intruder in the attic) and Close—well, she’s almost scary in her Bloomingdale’s frizz but eases up when giving goofyface approval to bed sharing. (If their “share” proved too much for some viewers, it works as hangover from the love-in 60s; also works because sex functions as antidote for death: who hasn’t experienced sudden if not guilty horniness during grief?) Mary Kay Place is refreshing as a lawyer unapologetically calling her clients scum and, unattached, becomes communal property. Representing the middle-aged unmarrieds without the vicissitudes from Women’s Lib, she’s too huggably sane for us to feel any pity. The Vietnam vet hiding his stash in his beatup Porsche, William Hurt seems realistically hammered—a junked-up Stanislavsky. Tom Berenger’s immediately super-personable when seeing him on a plane getting loaded on Smirnoff and gazing at his own picture on the cover of US; the magnetic boyishness stays strong. Jeff Goldblum the token minority nearly against the grain: his gangling ethnicity is Kasdan’s subtle plant to expose some anti-Semitic undertones endured during his university days in Michigan. Reminding us of Barbra—one minute homely, the next a classic beauty—Jeff delivers as critic-clown the then-growing caution about the emerging plastic journalism. JoBeth Williams has the sour role of premature matron dreaming of writing short stories and we’re grateful there aren’t any samples. She got the hubbie she wanted yet realizes soon into the unexpected reunion she’s prepared to snare old flame Berenger. (No goody two shoes—she drinks, smokes pot, fornicates like the rest—but there’s something naggingly drippy about her, maybe because when looking back at our own old gangs, there is always that one prig?) Kasdan doesn’t harangue over disappointment about how our lives didn’t work out as we hoped, he’s really rather frugal on how sincere intentions are removed by distance, by persistent inertia, by taking for granted there’s plenty of time for another homecoming. This 1983 glossy reconciler did for old Ma Bell and those long-gone weekend excursion fares what E.T. did for Kleenex and Reese’s Pieces. Yet in the 21st century, The Big Chill intimates a future lib retirement community in red South Carolina.

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