The Big Chill Is Gone
Everyone has a favorite movie, and throughout our life, the movie itself never changes.
Or does it?
In nineteen-eighty-three, I was twenty-five years old when the movie ‘The Big Chill’ was released.
The tagline for the movie was, How much love, sex, fun and friendship can a person take?
What twenty-five-year-old isn’t going to see that movie.
I loved this movie, my friends loved this movie, everyone I knew loved this movie. Here was a group of friends who, sadly, reunite after the suicide of a college friend fifteen years after graduating.
After the funeral, the group spends the weekend at their friends Harold and Sara’s home.
Note: This is not a movie review, just my perception of a film I saw forty-one years ago, so if I miss plot points, forgive me.
Here were friends that still acted the way they were in college. Smoked pot, drank, danced to Motown (‘Ain’t to Proud to Beg’) in the kitchen while they cleaned up after dinner.
I’m embarrassed to admit now, but at a shore house sometime after we saw the movie, a group of of us (I’m not naming names) poorly re-enacted that scene while getting dinner ready.
We identified with these characters. However, not at our age we were then, but aspired to be a decade later.
Up on screen, we hoped that would be us in our thirties, with real jobs, some with family, but still when we’d get together, the same old college kids.
At least, that was the hope.
Decades later, when I watched the movie again, I had been married with three children, and then divorced.
From that perspective, those happy-go-lucky college friends dancing in the kitchen to Motown were, to be blunt, assholes.
Maybe not assholes, more like self-absorbed, egotistic, self-centered, self-involved, selfish (you see where I’m going with this) people.
Okay, so yes, assholes.
They were all about themselves, whether it was drugs, relationships, personal gratification, and of course, sex.
When one of the friends has a run-in with the law, he chides his friend who tried to intervene on the police officer’s behalf, “When did you get so friendly with cops?”
He tells his friend how that cop kept this house from being ripped off.
“Twice.”
There is some emotional improvement in that scene, and perhaps some might have grown up while others remained the same.
There is one scene, however, that turns the tide from the characters being ‘dancing in the kitchen’ cool kids to ‘what a bunch of assholes’ when I viewed this movie as an older adult.
The husband of one of the college woman is in the kitchen having a late night snack. Two of the college friends discovers him there. The husband tells them how he has insomnia, and at night in the quiet, he thinks about his kids.
He tells them how kids have their priorities and, as parents, you are there to protect and provide for them even if your own life doesn’t turn out the way you planned. Maybe you find yourself kowtowing to some asshole at work, doing things you never thought you’d do, just to get by. But you minimize that stuff and be the best person you can be.
He said, “Nobody said it was going to be fun,” then added, “at least nobody said it to me.”
He continues with his snack while he two college friends stare at him like they didn’t understand a word he just said.
Spoiler Alert: One of the two college friends who sat in this kitchen, and listened to this man talk about his life and kids, ends up sleeping with that man’s wife.
Classy.
The movie continues.
One friend, a journalist, does his best to hook up with the girlfriend of the friend they just buried.
One woman, who wants to have a child, basically goes through a check list of who would be best of the group to father her baby.
Turns out, it was the husband of the couple that hosted the weekend party.
(Funny, when I spent weekends with friends down the shore, the biggest discussion we had was who was going to sleep on the couch)
When I viewed this movie at twenty-five I didn’t think twice about these actions.
In my forties, all I can think was ‘what the hell was wrong with me back then?’
Now, here’s the funny part.
I still love this movie, and watched it again before I wrote this post.
So, to answer the question I posed at the top of this post, no the movie didn’t change.
But I did.
Epilogue:
1. The Big Chill has the best soundtrack of any movie I ever watched. All Motown songs. They ruined that when they came out with a second soundtrack album, ‘The Big Chill: More Songs From The Original Soundtrack’ that contained songs that were not in the movie soundtrack.
2. The body dressed during the opening credits, whose face is never shown, is Kevin Costner. There were flashback scenes shot with the group in college, that included Costner, which were cut out of the film. The director, Lawrence Kasdan, promised Costner a part in his next movie.
That movie?
Silverado, which turned out to be Costner’s breakout roll.
