For many years now I’ve had an appreciation for a little-seen, little-talked about early Kenneth Branagh movie from 1992 called Peter’s Friends. It’s a charming comedy-drama about a group of university friends who were in a comedy troupe together reuniting for the first time in over a decade when one of them inherits their father’s estate. Mostly I’ll admit I was drawn to it because it features the only ever movie reunion of Cambridge Footlights stalwarts Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, and Hugh Laurie. Eventually I became aware however that it is essentially a British version of an American movie that already existed and was far more acclaimed. And watching The Big Chill for the first time, I couldn’t help notice all the ways that Peter’s Friends rips it off, and that it is honestly the better movie.
Co-written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan hot off of writing Return of the Jedi it very much feels apiece with an early film of his compatriot George Lucas. Where in American Graffiti, Lucas nostalgically reflected on the early 1960s from the vantage point of that era with a sense of mourning for its loss, Kasdan with The Big Chill examines that same romance from a Baby Boomer perspective two decades on from those golden years now in the context of the radically different adult world of the 1980s. And it speaks very well to the disillusionment of a lot of that generation, how certain values and habits were made to change. How did the hippies of the 60s become the yuppies of the 80s? This is a movie that strives to answer that question.
The premise of The Big Chill is of a tight-knit group of friends who came of age in the late 60s reuniting in the early 80s under the tragic circumstances of the suicide of their friend Alex. Nobody knows exactly why he did it, and as they meditate on his potential reasons and the weight of the loss while together over a few days at a farm in Beaufort, South Carolina, they bond and reassess their relationships and history, how they’ve changed in maturity and how they feel about where they are in life.
They are a very compelling mix of characters played by an ensemble of actors, many of whom were just at the cusp of breaking out. There’s Harold (Kevin Kline), a business owner about to sell out to a large corporation, and Sarah Cooper (Glenn Close), a doctor - the only married members of the gang who own the plantation and host their friends during the funeral and after. Sam Weber (Tom Berenger) is a successful actor out in California, the star of a Magnum P.I.-style cop show (he even has a Tom Selleck moustache). His old flame Karen Bowens (JoBeth Williams) is in a fairly loveless marriage after giving up her own artistic ambitions. Sarcastic Michael Gold (Jeff Goldblum) is a tabloid reporter, cynical about the subjects of his career and looking to get into the nightclub business. Attorney Meg Jones (Mary Kay Place) is unattached but feels an intense need to have a kid, and with one of her old friends. And Nick Carlton (William Hurt) is a former psychologist and scarred Vietnam War vet struggling with sexual impotence. Also hanging around is Chloe (Meg Tilly), Alex’s girlfriend about a decade younger than everyone else who was with him at the estate when he died and is curiously detached over the situation.
Chloe's soft and distracted attitude however is a solid indication of who and where Alex was at the time of his death, even if she too is uncertain what drove him to it. More than the others he perhaps had clung onto the philosophy and patterns of their youth and found a girl in manner out of step with the far more square modern age. And indeed it appears they were full-on hippies in their previous life -ensconced in the music, the culture, the drugs, and that good old free love, having each (with the possible exception of Michael) been intimate with more than one of their friends of the opposite sex.
They all loved each other, and even with distance and time, show that they still do. And it is one of the movie's most endearing qualities that the depth of their friendship feels so real. The movie was filmed on location in South Carolina and the cast lived locally together for about four months, hanging out and bonding themselves to create that feeling of authentic long-term friendship. Indeed it is possible too that several of them knew each other socially already through interconnecting stage careers in New York -Close, Kline, and Hurt were all hovering around Broadway about the same time in the late 70s. But however it was cultivated, its presence on-screen is pretty lovely. And it’s a warming thing to watch scenes of these old friends dancing to their 60s music as they cook dinner, watching a football game and later playing in a yard, or just affectionately hanging out late into the evening in the sitting room. Of course it is in vulnerable moments like these where they reckon with the death of their friend and with the state of their lives and varied careers. Nobody is quite in the place they expected to be.
Sarah and Harold have settled into domesticity, Sarah perhaps formerly the most liberated of any of them. Karen is trapped in her life and unsatisfying marriage, much as she loves the kids and the comforts -but for both her and the Coopers, this time away from parenthood is a reprieve from that world. Even Sam, perhaps the most successful of the bunch, clearly craves the escape from his own fame in this company -much as he may exploit it in other areas of his life. He’s bashful about a scene from his show that they watch on TV that might otherwise come off as cool -but because this lot know him it plays very differently. And he’s okay with that. Coming together for Alex’s funeral and being together is, for all of them, a chance to have those old days back if even just for a while. Certainly we see signs of the patterns that re-emerge: a slight rivalry between Sam and Nick, Michael’s and Meg’s various flirtations, even Nick at one point being arrested for speeding. But that melancholy is also hanging too -Sarah, who’d had an affair with Alex a few years back, trying to hide the morose effect on her, Sam and Karen attempting to have a serious conversation on the matter that Nick shoots down, and just the general air of a group of former bohemians for perhaps the first time having to reckon with mortality.
For one at least it wasn’t the first time. Though everyone is terrific in the movie, with Close and Berenger as particularly noteworthy stand-outs, it’s Hurt who gives the best performance as the most interesting character. Nick is a guy deeply troubled and traumatized, and who is bad at pretending that he’s not. We don’t learn much about the specifics of his war experience except that it perhaps has something to do with his impotence, which he’s ashamed of in spite of his habit of brushing it off or even couching it in humour. Humour just generally is his defence mechanism, even where clearly inappropriate. In one scene, he mimics one of his former psychiatry interviews for the camera mockingly to no one but Chloe, who takes a sweet if far too soon liking to him. He is the guy with the most baggage, and Hurt plays very well the bubbling rage and sadness always threatening to burst to the surface; but though he frustrates his friends he clearly loves and needs them, more than any of the rest need each other honestly.
Nick stands as the perfect avatar of how visceral the change in their lives and priorities have been. He seems the most lost in this modern world, but really a lot of them are. Michael pursues his nightclub idea as perhaps a way of feeling young and rebellious again, fairly cynically aware of how his work seems to espouse the opposite virtues he once held -Meg in some respects too, who is caught between her mainstream desire to have a kid and her counterculture idea of having them with an old friend out of wedlock (the resolution to this story is quite wild and the most hippie thing to happen in the movie). Harold is quietly dealing with going from little guy to corporate stooge, Karen is at a crossroads about her feelings towards her conservative lifestyle. Indeed an undercurrent is the allure of Reagan’s baby boomer-friendly economy for these folks who protested Johnson and Nixon. They’re all aware of their faded idealism, and to an extent long for it, but can’t through their contentment. The film is very bittersweet in this way, and while it does touch on a theme of a reluctant though inevitable conservatism with age, I don’t know that Kasdan entirely believes that as much as in just a general evolution of values and priorities in adulthood informed by prevalent winds of society. If they were this age in the 60s I don’t think it would be the same -they would look back on the more conservative 40s while resigning themselves to a moderately more liberal present. Kasdan, reflecting on his youth, maintains real affection for it because rather than in spite of its great distance in lifestyle from the 80s.
And he fills out the movie with a soundtrack of 60s pop and R&B hits: Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, CCR, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations -”Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” is a particularly fun needle-drop, the one that most emphasizes the goofy friendship between these people. When these songs come on you can almost see their younger selves grooving and having a good time, unconcerned with the banalities and difficulties of life.
We almost did see that literally. The film was originally supposed to end on a flashback to the 60s and the characters’ simpler lives. It was shot and edited even, with Kevin Costner (another up-and-comer at the time) cast as Alex. It would have shown Karen dating Nick, and it would have been coloured by 60s ephemera. Ultimately it was cut and I think it was a good thing -Kasdan’s reasoning being it was better to leave Alex an unseen character. But I also think it might have spoiled things to actually see that time in their lives rather than just reflecting on it -apart from the actors having to play themselves as teenagers or early twenty-somethings. It would have gone against one of the movie’s virtues of reconciling the past as past.
Instead, The Big Chill ends on the gang looking forward. Nick is going to stick around for a little bit with Sarah and Harold, and especially Chloe to perhaps help him heal. There’s a future on the horizon for Sam and Karen as they both head back to California. Meg hopefully has her baby by one of her friends. And Michael, coming round to how bad all his friends think the nightclub idea is, reneges on those plans. He’s the one who affirms nobody’s leaving -that their friendship will endure whatever turbulence this decade brings. It’s one of the sweetest depictions of adult friendship that I’ve seen. Honest, but kind and hopeful -this is a spectacularly endearing bunch. You finish the movie hoping for the best for them, and for your own friendships as well.
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