THE BIG CHILL: Blu-ray (Columbia 1983) Criterion Home Entertainment
Director,
Lawrence Kasdan captures the essence of an awkward limbo for the middle-aged, seemingly
unprepared to deal with their own maturity and definitely not ready to
surrender the ghost of their youth in The
Big Chill (1983); an angst and cliché-ridden baby boom-boomer cult classic,
relying much too heavily on deftly scripted zingers to dig its ensemble cast
out of virtually any lingering doubts and self-pities. Here is a film in which
even the suicide of one of their own (the never seen Kevin Costner, cast as the
corpse, Alex) takes the proverbial backseat to a weekend-long probing of the
not-so-distant past; old grudges, never forgotten crushes, brewing infidelities
and biological clocks ticking in tandem - in short, the breadth of mid-life
crises come tumbling forth; our protagonists bemoaning what they’ve become, if
only because the world hasn’t come around to their insular way of thinking. Get
over it. Learn to live with disappointment! I have.
But the
characters in The Big Chill just
can’t seem to get over this hump, despite the fact all have inevitably moved on
with their adult lives. Two great one liners (and there are many in the
Kasdan/Barbara Benedek screenplay) summarize Kasdan’s premise for the picture:
the first uttered by our I Mother Earth denizen of this dysfunctional brood,
Sarah Cooper (Glenn Close) “I always felt
I was at my best with you people”, the second, astutely given to the movie’s
atypical frantic feminist (every late 70’s/early 80’s movie seems to have one)
– herein, deflated and disillusioned at not finding the ideal man: attorney,
Meg Jones (Mary Kay Place) – “It’s a cold
world out there. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting a little frosty myself.”
In some ways, Sarah and Meg represent
the equipoise of the female perspective; the other two women in the ensemble
(Meg Tilly’s Chloe, the uninformed contortionist gal pal of the deceased, and
JoBeth Williams’ Karen Bowens - a milquetoast, who sold her principles for the
‘comfortable’ but unremarkable life with hubby, Richard – and regrets it) never
go beyond the hook and worm stage of this fishing expedition.
The male
spectrum is even more disingenuous; Harold Cooper (Kevin Kline) mourning a best
friend, who also just happened to be sleeping with his wife. Sam Weber (Tom
Berenger cast as an actor playing a TV rip off of Magnum P.I.) is struggling to
reconcile his fictional self’s overt testosterone-ramped machismo with his own demure
masculinity. “In Hollywood, I don't know
who to trust. I don't know who likes me or why they even do like me,”
admits Sam. There’s also People Magazine writer, Michael Gold (Jeff Goldblum);
so shut off from his own emotions he’s given most of the movie’s pithy retorts
– the proverbial smart ass on practically any subject the others care to bring
up – particularly Alex’s untimely passing (“It’s
a dead subject”), and commenting on the wake itself as an “…amazing tradition. They throw a great
party for you on the one day they know you can't come.” These are very
funny, if astutely stinging lines and they continue to work even when the story
doesn’t.
Finally, there’s
Nick Carlton (William Hurt); diminished by his Viet Nam service who, like Alex,
has since foundered badly in his private life and isn’t afraid to open the
floodgates of cynicism, meant to shake the others free from their rose-colored melancholy. “A long
time ago we knew each other for a short period of time,” Nick coldly reasons,
“…It was easy back then. No one had a
cushier berth than we did. It's not surprising our friendship could survive
that. It's only out there, in the real world, that it gets tough.”
Alas, The Big Chill explores each
character’s multifaceted complexities with only occasional sincerity; thanks
mostly to Kasdan’s hand-picked ensemble. None were major stars when the film
came out. Most went on to have memorable careers thereafter. But the story,
scripted by Kasdan and Barbara Benedek continues to lack impetus. Our weekend-long
soul search includes listening – and sporadically dancing – to an interminable
retro soundtrack of mid-60’s early 70’s pop/rock hits, inserted whenever Kasdan
feels the need to take a break from ‘too much reality’; diffused even further
by some mellow personal history shared over recreational marijuana, ample
bottles of flowing wine and a few none-too-serious skirmishes between ‘old
friends’ destined to remain such even after the final fade out. And let’s not
forget illicit sex – or rather, sex between friends, sanctioned by their
spouses. I’m sorry. I must have missed the chapter in Masters and Johnson where
the penis was described as a share toy. But, I digress.
The Big Chill is a film without a story to tell – all
character-driven and centered on the proverbial elephant in the room no one
wants to talk about – Alex’s death. The ‘we’
generation, having left the cocoon of campus life long ago and since morphed
into its navel-gazing ‘me’ derivative
are, generally speaking, an unsympathetic lot. The most altruistic moment in
the picture goes to Sarah loaning Harold to Meg for the night so Meg can
conceive his illegitimate child and fulfil her own selfish desire to become a
single mother. Big-hearted/empty-headed liberalism run amuck, indeed; and don’t
we already know Sarah is prepared to hold it against her ever-lovin’ man, telling
him with a deliciously vindictive grin the next morning “Do you have to look so pleased with yourself?” – the pot calling
the kettle black. Remember, Sarah and Alex were lovers. But their infidelity
was predicated on nothing more humanitarian than abject lust; Sarah spending a
quiet moment, balling her eyes out while crouched naked in the shower, even as
Harold and the other are gathered in the living room to debate the many reasons
why and feel guilty and sorry for themselves.
Kasdan wisely
keeps nearly all of his scenes confined to the rooms of Beaufort, South
Carolina’s antebellum plantation house; production designer, Ida Random finding
a balance between Kasdan’s insistence on art deco and her own interpretation of
a softer – and more naturalistic – look for the film. Sequestering our stars in
a few claustrophobic spaces ensures they can’t get away from what’s eating them
from the inside out. But the other great strength Kasdan manages to imbue The Big Chill with is an intuitive use
of the camera to capture even the subtlest nuances in body language. There’s
always purpose behind his slow moving pans and zooms; expertly timed as a
result of a lengthy gestation and rehearsal period.
On one point,
Kasdan remained adamant: a lengthy flashback to summarize and emphasize the perspective
each character had come from in their collective past. But the flashback became
a bone of contention between Kasdan and his editor, Carol Littleton, who
astutely concurred from the outset, it was unnecessary. Repeatedly chastised
for this opinion, Littleton allowed Kasdan’s decision to stand – attempting to
relocate the flashback from its originally intended place at the end of the
movie to several other spots, including as an extended prologue. It just never
worked. Eventually, Kasdan realized this too – particularly after two sneak
peak previews – and the flashback, featuring virtually all of Kevin Costner’s
scenes as Alex, fell to the cutting room floor.
Initially,
Columbia studio president, Frank Price did not want to make The Big Chill in hindsight, a big
mistake. After all, Columbia was in dire financial straits, buffeted by a check-forging
scandal in the early 1970’s and an antitrust lawsuit filed against wily Vegas
financier, Kirk Kerkorian to prevent his hostile corporate takeover of the studio
at the end of the decade. Columbia could narrowly afford to invest in a quiet
little feature about existential crises that had no precedence to pay out;
especially when summer blockbusters had fast become the norm in Hollywood. On
the flip side, The Big Chill cost
relatively little to shoot and grossed a then impressive $56,342,711.
Our story
begins with bad news – played in silence - before segueing to the mortuary’s
preparation of Alex’s remains, cleverly disguised by Kasdan as perhaps a bit of
kink; close-ups of long blood-red female fingernails gingerly straightening a
man’s necktie, tightening his belt buckle and affixing his cufflinks, before
gently turning over his wrists to reveal three deep gashes stitched, pulling up
a crisp white dress shirt to conceal them. We meet the friends of the deceased;
Harold choking back the tears as he delivers a eulogy from the pulpit. Only
Nick arrives late, too busy ingesting from his small pharmaceutical stash. As
Karen strikes up an organist’s rendition of The Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want, the mourners file out; Nick
offering Meg a lift to the cemetery; Harold accompanying Sarah, and Sam driving
Michael and Chloe – who openly admits to being disappointed at not asked by
Alex’s family to ride up front with them; explaining a moment later “I always wanted to ride in a limo!”
Kasdan’s early
set-up of the friends’ collective grief – or rather, their different ways of
coping, either through laughter, tears or indifference – is highly commendable.
In just a few brief exchanges he gives us all we need to know about these
archetypes. As example: Karen’s fastidiousness as the ‘unhappy’ homemaker is
captured in her compliment to Sarah during the reception, “I know this is hard but it’s all beautiful.” Sarah asserts, “Yeah, we put on a great funeral”, to
which Michael glibly suggests, “Maybe
I’ll have mine here.” The leitmotif of good humor is dealt a crippling blow
after Sarah quietly replies, “We give
first priority to people who kill themselves in one of our bathrooms…that was a
terrible thing to say... I don't know why I said it.”
The Big Chill is peppered in such moments of conflicted
introspection. The writing is, in fact, what keeps the pace of the movie on its
steady course. Arguably, it’s also what deflates the drama from experiencing
any distinctive highs or lows. Instead, all of the action occurs on a fairly
nondescript middle plain. Is this life? Perhaps. Does it work as a movie? Hmmmm…
Michael wastes no time hitting on Chloe who shows little remorse during the
reception at Sarah and Harold’s plantation house. And although he openly
criticizes his place of employment as purveyors of rank gossip – even
apologizing to Sam for a story People Magazine ran on the breakup of his
marriage – Michael, nevertheless, uses his very first opportunity to skulk off
to an upstairs telephone and beg his editor, Jim, to do a story on his friends’
grief – calling the piece ‘the lost hope.’ Michael’s way of coping with a
personal loss or just a bottom feeder looking for his next fix?
In the
meantime, Meg pours out her own ‘cry me a
river’ to Sarah in the kitchen, rationalizing her deplorable taste in men
thus: “They're either married or gay. And
if they're not gay, they've just broken up with the most wonderful woman in the
world, or they've just broken up with a bitch who looks exactly like me.
They're in transition from a monogamous relationship and they need more space.
Or they're tired of space, but they just can't commit. Or they want to commit,
but they're afraid to get close. They want to get close…you don't want to get
near them.”
All this is
exposition – or rather, fodder, meant to engage and whet our appetites for
deeper wellsprings of emotion to follow. But the real tragedy in The Big Chill is we never go deeper
than this over the course of the next 90 minutes. Kasdan moves us into the
aftermath of the wake where presumably more primitive emotions will be allowed
to run their course; Sarah’s breakdown in the shower; Nick’s bitterness and
relief Alex didn’t leave a suicide note for their morbid satisfaction; Sarah,
having regained her composure, now rejoining the group to admit, “I know he wasn't happy. That doesn't tell
you much. I'd no idea how bad it was. I think he purposely wanted to cut off
from all of us because he was so unhappy with where he was at.” All eyes in
the room turn to Chloe, the last person to see Alex alive, and by her own
admission, having had the most incredible sex of her life with Alex only hours
before his suicide. When Karen asks for a confirmation of Alex’s sadness, all
Chloe can do is shrug her shoulders and admit, “I don't know. We had some good times. I haven't met many happy
people in my life. How do they act?”
As the group
prepares to retire for the night they are decidedly no closer to the truth
about Alex’s suicide. The Big Chill
should have had more to say on this, and, the screenplay does, in fact, include
a moment of introspective dialogue, delivered by Sam, who suggests everyone is
avoiding having ‘the talk’ because
they are afraid to face their own mortality and emotions; the weekend devolving
into a series of rekindled friendships that, without Alex’s death, would never
have happened. But Kasdan is really the one afraid to pursue the matter; giving
us needless – if deftly executed – bits of business; the first between Nick and
Meg. She is all prepared to seduce him in an upstairs attic for the selfish
sake of having him sire her child, only to be chagrined when Nick informs her
of an old war wound preventing him from experiencing any kind of sexual
pleasure. By his own admission, Nick can’t even jerk off. This too might have
been a moment rife for personal discovery. But again, Kasdan dilutes it, now with
a shameless bit of slapstick; a tiny bat terrorizing the couple and forcing Meg
downstairs. Harold and Sam rush upstairs with tennis rackets to defend
themselves. Inadvertently, they allow a second bat to enter the room through an
open skylight.
As everyone
settles in for the night, Sarah gets high on some recreational marijuana,
attempting to engage Harold in a conversation by crawling back and forth over
him in bed. He isn’t interested however, and, in the early morning fog we
discover why. Nick and Harold take to the deserted streets for a jog, Harold
confiding in Nick about Sarah’s extramarital affair with Alex. Nick reaffirms
Sarah’s love for Harold is genuine. “She
didn’t marry Alex,” he explains. It’s a moot point, perhaps. For love and
marriage seem fairly divisible by increments of jealousy and regret. As the fog
breaks, another more cerebral kind is about to descend upon our mourner. Karen
sends Richard away – back home to their kids. In fact, it’s her feeble
brushoff; the very sight of Sam rekindling home fires and holocausts of lust
from within. Interestingly, Sam is, at first, obtuse – or squarely unaware of
Karen’s renewed affections. Even after she makes them abundantly clear, he
cannot bring himself to the edge of that very still water, using Karen’s
children as an excuse. She bitterly chastises him for it, her vitriol shocking
and honest.
A short while
later, a state trooper, Peter (Ken Place) arrives with Nick in tow, making
inquiries as to whether or not he is Harold’s weekend guest. Nick is
belligerent - and high. The situation is diffused when Peter suggests he will
look the other way on a possible drug charge if Sam can show him how his TV
character, J.T. Lancer, is able to leap the hood of his sports car and land in
the driver’s seat. Nick tells Sam to ignore the request. But in his attempt to
satisfy Peter’s query, Sam’s leg becomes lodged in the car door, causing him to
trip and cut his forearm. While Sarah – a doctor by trade – rushes for her
medical bag and First Aid kit, Peter apologizes to Harold, who encourages him
to forget the whole darn mess. After Peter leaves, Nick and Harold have words:
Harold informing Nick he will brook no more of his nonsense. “What is it with you?” he asks Nick,
while not really wanting to heart the answer, “Is jail another experience you want to try? See what that's like? You
know, I live here. This place means something to me. I'm dug in. I don't need
this shit.”
The character
of Nick is, perhaps, the closest Kasdan ever comes to showing us what the last
act of Alex’s life must have been; a sad loner, drifting from one hapless
profession to the next, completely lost and virtually abandoned his aspirations,
now relying on cocaine to get him through a fallow period that can only end in
death, regrettably, the malaise come to envelope and take control over his
life. Nick and Chloe are, in some ways, kindred spirits; she – the gentle
sparrow unwilling to give up or give in – even to feel sorry for herself; he –
like a wounded animal in desperate need of someone to sincerely look after him.
Will it end for them the same way it did for Alex? Kasdan is circumspect in his
assumptions people cannot change the trajectory of their lives. Alas, he is
severely unrealistic in the resolutions he provides as counterpoint to his
drama.
The last act
of The Big Chill is so optimistic it
borders on becoming a parody of all that has gone before it. In taking a phone
call from their son, Sarah is asked to put Auntie Meg on the telephone to thank
her for a birthday gift; her doting exchange with the child suddenly sparking an
epiphany. Sarah can kill two birds with one stone. Perhaps still feeling guilty
about her own infidelity with Alex, she can bring Harold down to her level by
sanctioning a one night stand between him and Meg on the pretext of helping her
best friend conceive a child by the only man she would likely trust with her
body. Lest we remember, these were still the days before artificial insemination.
In the meantime, Nick and Sam have a confrontation; Sam storming out of the
house for a moonlit walk, interrupted by Karen. She chides him again,
confessing her desperation to have him make love to her. There is a queer sort
of mechanical quality to what follows; Kasdan cross-cutting between Harold and
Meg’s measured and tender lovemaking in an upstairs bedroom, and Sam and Karen’s
frenzied exchange of bodily fluids on the front lawn.
In another
part of this maison, Michael makes a last ditch play for Chloe – again, politely
shot down – she more interested in Nick; already knowing he cannot satisfy her
sexually. But Chloe takes Nick to the old cottage on the property – Alex’s
favorite hangout and confides he reminds her of Alex. Nick directly addresses
her on this point, “I’m not him!”
Nevertheless, Alex’s spirit seems to be all around them; Nick finally grounded
and having a renewed sense of purpose in his own life. He will remain here – at
least, for a time.
The next morning,
Michael glibly comments “How’d everyone
sleep last night…did anyone sleep last night?” Sarah and Meg exchange
telling glances and Michael informs the group his plans to raise money for a
new nightclub in New York are dead. He has decided to return to his first love –
writing – quit his current job at the magazine and pursue his dreams to pen the
great American novel. Asked where he intends to work on this opus magnum, Michael
teases Harold and Sarah he intends to live with them in perpetuity. In fact,
none of the friends are ever planning to leave. It’s college all over again.
Only this time they are a family with unbreakable bonds of friendship likely to
last.
Since its
debut, The Big Chill has been
endlessly imitated and parodied, though arguably never duplicated. Beneath the obviousness of its self-involved
baby boomers struggling to dissect and reinvent their lives, Lawrence Kasdan
gives us a more fruitful and analytic critique. Life has rendered these
characters unrecognizable to themselves. They’re not yet ready to assume the
mantle of responsibility as their parents did; the last gasps of their own ‘let it all hang out’ generation unable
to deny a deeper reality each time they look in the mirror; that time has
indeed moved on – if not, quite yet, without them. Kasdan exposes commonalities
between adolescence and middle-age; both seemingly catching us off guard and
wreaking havoc on our ideals and sense of self. In youth, we test the physical
boundaries of our mortality. In middle-age we refuse to accept the march of
time – while realizing - we are no longer able to feign youth as an excuse for
bad behavior. Forcing these characters to confront their own mortality via the
unexpected loss of one of their own sets up an extreme conflict from within;
Kasdan suggesting reflection can be more damaging than therapeutic.
There is, to
be sure, a narcissistic quality to this exercise; each character much too
self-involved to truly empathize with what the others are going through and
strangely even more incapable of deducing they might each be going through the
same motions apart. In absence of any greater understanding, any rank emotional
outburst or response in and of the moment will do. Hence, we can almost accept
Sarah’s decision to pimp her husband out for the night. We might even buy into
Meg and Harold’s unencumbered enjoyment of this ‘sex between friends’ moment,
transpiring with no greater emotional bond beyond the biological. The film
makes no comment on this new life being brought into this world a bastard –
one, likely to impact and perhaps, even intrude on the future of their
friendships.
While Kasdan
handles the encounter between Harold and Meg with great gentleness, he is
disturbingly visceral in illustrating the sex between Karen and Sam. Theirs is
not a sharing, per say, but an expulsion of life-time regrets; a sort of
distasteful mutual dissatisfaction achieved only via the orgasm itself, but
with no lasting commitment, and, arguably, not even the remotest promise of
one. The only reality for Nick and Chloe is one of celibacy; and yet, of all
the relationships in The Big Chill
this seems the most likely to endure, perhaps because each participant has gone
through their own trial by fire; Chloe unsure of how to react; Nick, belatedly
prepared to step up to the plate and surrender his prolonged and disturbingly
self-destructive adult behavior. In the
end, this leaves Jeff Goldblum’s failed entrepreneur, arguably the most
self-absorbed and self-deprecating of the lot, to fend for himself; the odd man
out in our game of musical bedrooms; unless, of course, we count Karen’s
castoff husband, Richard.
Richard’s
great scene comes early in the film; the night before Karen sends him home
alone so she can pursue Sam. Although her motivation is never explained to
Richard, he is nobody’s fool. Moreover, it doesn’t take an outsider to see their
marriage is over even if neither is willing to concede it. Confessing his
insomnia to Sam and Nick, Richard quietly explains a fundamental betrayal in
life: “There’s always some asshole at
work you have to kowtow to, and you find yourself doing things you thought
you'd never do. But you try and minimize that stuff; be the best person you can
be. But you set your priorities. And that's the way life is. I wonder if your
friend, Alex, knew that. One thing’s for sure, he couldn't live with it. I know
I shouldn't talk; you guys knew him. But the thing is... no one ever said it would
be fun. At least... no one ever said it to me.”
With The Big Chill, Kasdan gives us the
blackest of comedies. It isn’t that his protagonists are shying away from being
more truthful to each other and themselves about the meaning of life. It’s that
they are incapable of feeling as deeply about anything as they once did while
still young, impressionable and caught in the throes of their own self-absorbed
rosy futures. Now, at a crossroads, the path ahead looking neither as auspicious
nor as infinitely rife with possibilities, each character must face the
uncertainties of life anew – and alone. Some have made it through to the next
round relatively unscathed. Others are arguably being given another opportunity
to approach the same set of circumstances from an entirely different set of
values and perspective. Will it all work out in the end? Hmmmm. Lawrence Kasdan
never returns to his cast for answers. It would be fascinating for him to do a
sequel; everyone having naturally matured and decidedly reached their emeritus
years by now.
The Big Chill arrives via a new 4k master from Sony, exclusively
produced and released to Criterion Home Entertainment. It’s mostly good stuff
here; Grover Crisp’s meticulous attention to preserving the old Columbia
archives giving us a very pleasing 1080p transfer. I’ve read a few reviews
overly critical about residual softness and ‘exaggerated’ grain levels. Sorry
to disagree, but The Big Chill on
Blu-ray looks about as solid, refined and unencumbered by digital manipulations
as I’ve ever seen it on home video. This is one exceptionally fine looking
disc. Framed in the proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio, what we have here is an
accurate rendering of imperfect vintage 80’s film stocks with all the proper
color timing/correction applied to rectify age-related degeneration and fading.
The Big Chill was never a movie exhibiting a richly saturated color
palette. No, it’s more muted pastels and gloomy greens, greys and browns – the earthy
textures of a South Carolina winter-scape. There is a thickness to the image,
thoroughly in keeping with John Bailey’s cinematography. Fine detail isn’t
razor sharp, nor was it ever meant to be. But shadow delineation is superb and
close-ups reveal some truly exquisite detail in hair, flesh and clothing. About
flesh tones – mostly accurate, though, on occasion, looking just a shade too
pinkish for my tastes. Again, adjust your monitor and think positive thoughts.
It’s not the transfer that’s flawed.
Sony has given
us the option to experience the film’s soundtrack in either its original LPCM
1.0 mono or in a sparkling new DTS 5.1. The mono has been remastered from original
magnetic tracks; the 5.1 is a deftly handling blend of stereo masters for the
songs seamlessly combined with surviving 3-track dialogue and effects stems. Toggling
between the two, I have to say I much preferred the new 5.1 (unusual for me,
because I’m generally a purist at heart…also, because I’ve heard enough bad ‘remastered
5.1 audios – rechanneled and/or repurposed and/or reimagined, but that, in no
way, preserve or represent the movie’s original intent). A stereo track should
never take you ‘out’ of a movie viewing experience as in “Wow! Listen to that song or Whoa! Those bullets sounded like they came
right past my head!” The Big Chill
in stereo is remarkably faithful to Kasdan’s vision; the dialogue and SFX
carefully integrated with that memorable back catalog of Motown and classic
rock songs, given their new lease on life in 5.1.
Criterion affords
us a new interview with Lawrence Kasdan who is remarkable in his recall of
events on both the making of this movie and the overall arc in his career. The
two best features herein are an hour-long documentary produced by Laurent Bouzereau
from 1998 and the cast reunion held at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. There’s
overlap of info in these pieces but a lot of fresh and meaty material to
appreciate besides. Bottom line: highly
recommended.
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
3
VIDEO/AUDIO
4.5
EXTRAS
4
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