The Big Chill

Another creation for COM 204.

Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 reunion film, The Big Chill, is a film which shows seven college friends mourning the death of one of their own, joined by his young girlfriend. The weekend following the funeral shows the group beginning the mourning process and exposing truths and feelings that never would have emerged otherwise. The film also stars a cast of top notch, baby-boomer-era actors and actresses showing what their generation is like twenty years after the era that identified them in the first place. They were the spokesmen (and women) of a generation that had been quiet for a number of years and was now facing issues that needed to again be addressed. The Big Chill also possesses a soundtrack so infectious and perfectly integrated into the film that one’s first instinct after viewing is to buy the soundtrack album. These elements of acting and soundtrack, along with the simple scenery and camera work, makes The Big Chill something to see.

The Big Chill is a film that relies solely on dialogue to keep the audience interested, because frankly there isn’t much beyond that in the film. No car chases, or bombs, or even too much sex, so the dialogue must be, and is, the center of attention. Lawrence Kasdan ensured this by setting the film out in the un-distracting country of the south, and by keeping the colors of the indoor surroundings extremely subdued and visually quiet. This film is not visually stimulating, as a generality, and allows the audience to focus completely on the actors who are executing their craft as perfectly as humanly possible.

Although most of the camera angles in The Big Chill are straightforward and no-nonsense, there are a few shots that are extremely memorable. Vincent Canby, of the New York Times, wrote that “Mr. Kasdan is one of the finest of Hollywood's new young writers but The Big Chill, like Body Heat, demonstrates that he is a writer who works as much through images as through words.” One such shot is the scene where the funeral precession makes its way over an interestingly shaped bridge. The cars are all in a straight line and the camera is set from further away than the audience is from the characters throughout the film. However, the most memorable scene in the film is as memorable as it is simply because of the camera work. The opening sequence following the phone call that Sarah and Harold receive concerning Alex’s suicide is a montage that alternates between the initial reactions to Alex’s death and a man dressing. This man is actually Alex's corpse being dressed for his funeral, something discovered only in the last shot of the montage when the cuff of Alex's shirt being pulled over his wrist. The stitches indicate that the man is actually dead, and that he most likely killed himself by slashing his wrists. Later on in the story, this is confirmed through conversations amongst Alex’s friends. The opening montage tells, without a single word, everything that the audience has to know before being thrust into the most emotional day of the character’s lives.

The actors and actresses involved in The Big Chill are some of the greatest thespians of their generation. The film stars Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Berenger, Mary Kay Place, Jobeth Williams, and Meg Tilly, about half of whom have been nominated for or have won Academy Awards. Glenn Close has been nominated five times, one of which was for her role as Sarah in The Big Chill. William Hurt won the Best Actor Oscar in 1985 for Kiss of the Spider Woman and was nominated twice in the following years in the same category. Kevin Kline won with his only nomination for A Fish Called Wanda, while Meg Tilly and Tom Berenger were both nominated once for Academy Awards in the 1980’s. The Big Chill did not win any other Oscars, but was nominated in two other categories. Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedek were nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and the producer, Michael Shamberg was nominated for Best Picture of 1983. The film is also noted as the ideal ensemble piece in American cinema. As stated by The Austin Chronicle, “Each member of the well-chosen cast not only creates a distinct character with unique and memorable resonances but also meshes these separate personalities to form as satisfying an example of ensemble acting as we are likely to see for quite some time to come.”. “The performances represent ensemble playing of an order Hollywood films seldom have time for, with the screenplay providing each character with at least one big scene. If the actors were less consistent and the writing less fine, the scheme would be tiresome. "In The Big Chill it's part of the fun.”, Vincent Canby of The New York Times writes. A quick piece of trivia about The Big Chill that deals with acting is the cameo roles played by Kasdan’s wife and two sons, who were on the shoot to begin with. His wife, Meg Kasdan, plays the airline stewardess who talks to Sam Weber, played by Tom Berenger in the beginning of the film. Kasdan’s youngest son plays Harold and Sarah’s son in the opening sequence, while his other son, Jake, is the little autograph seeker at Alex’s funeral.

This finally brings the film to its soundtrack, which is for many the most important aspect of The Big Chill. Integrated both directly and indirectly into the film, the soundtrack is comprised of hits of the 1960’s, representing mostly Motown and the British Invasion. The New York Times review noted that “The soundtrack is loaded with 60's music that recalls, without sentimentality, everything the friends have grown away from.”. In some sequences, the music is brought in like normal soundtrack music, in that the characters cannot hear the music, but it serves to set a specific atmosphere for the scene. However, in other scenes, the music is provided directly by the characters. For instance, during Alex’s funeral, Karen, played by Jobeth Williams, plays “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, which seamlessly blends into the real song, which is played indirectly. Inside the Cooper residence, Sarah and Harold constantly have these hits of their college years playing the background of both deep discussions and light conversations. As noted by the Philadelphia City Paper, “Its solid-gold soundtrack laid the groundwork for movies as occasions to sell soundtrack CDs.”.

By combining these four major aspects of film making, acting, soundtrack, camera work, and set design, The Big Chill makes what could be simply a film of talking heads into a national discussion of the issues of the baby-boomer era in 1983. Instead of dealing with drugs, free love, and personal freedom, this generation is now coping with the deaths of friends, kids, jobs, and the real pressures of adult life. Up until this point, no other film had really allowed for such a discussion. The eighties, in film, were a time for big budget epics, such as Reds and Gandhi, and for angst-filled teen comedies that would impact a separate generation altogether. The issues of the film are not as prevalent today as they were in the 1980’s. As Christopher Null writes for filmcritic.com, “While the story doesn't carry as much grit as it did in 1983 -- surrogate pregnancy and drug use being the hot topics here -- it's still a lot of fun and it's the best example of ‘The Ensemble’ as star that you'll find in American cinema.” The Big Chill spoke for a generation that had lay dormant and quiet for almost fifteen years and was yearning to speak again. Efilmcritic.com writes that “In an ever-changing world, The Big Chill is a document of its time, just like Saturday Night Fever was to the 70’s, since it captured in that very moment how the “baby boom” generation and their ideals had grown (until then) over the past 20 years.”. Roger Ebert describes the feeling of the film best when he says, “It's a good movie. It's well acted, the dialogue is accurately heard and the camera is extremely attentive to details of body language. It observes wonderfully well how its veterans of the 1960s have grown up into adulthood, consumerhood, parenthood, drunkenhood, adulteryhood, and regrethood. These people could all be wearing warm-up jackets with poignancy stenciled on the backs.”

The Big Chill is a film that spoke for a generation by the people of that generation. Overall, the acting is superb, the set design is simple and lends to the subdued feeling of the Cooper home, the camera angles only get fancy when they have to, and the soundtrack is one that is not to be missed. By most reviewers, it was noted as a good to great film, mainly with reoccurring references to an earlier film, The Return of the Secaucus Seven. However, these references were generally brief and usually saying that the Big Chill had built on the genre of reunion film, not copied it.

Again, go out and rent this film.