The Big Chill 1983

[7.5/10] The Big Chill effectively has no plot. It doesn’t need one. Instead, it is the ultimate hang out movie. A group of old college pals reunite for a friend’s funeral. They hash things out. They reflect on their lives. They rekindle old friendships and attractions. They needle one another. They lament where they did or didn’t end up. They laugh. They cry. They grieve. They play some peculiar version of touch football. That’s it.

Okay, okay, one character has her husband impregnate their dear friend who desperately wants a baby, and another cheats on her husband with the man who’d been carrying a torch for her for twenty years, and another sort of slips into his dead friend’s life and relationship in his absence. Things happen! The final stanza of this one kind of goes off the rails from the slack, small stakes hang-out vibe of the beginning.

But for the most part, the attraction of The Big Chill is that it’s an exaggerated, but recognizable slice of life. In places, the film is a little too perfect; everyone’s a little too witty; the emotions are a little too perfectly tuned to clash and compliment. And yet, there’s a lot of truth to the film, particularly in the vibe of the interactions among its cast.

While obviously contoured for a film-viewing audience, director and co-writer Lawrence Kasan (who also directed another famous plotless hang-out film called The Empire Strikes Back) manages to make these eight people genuinely feel like a pack of old buddies reunited for the first time in a long time. The authenticity of that, the way it’s easy to feel like a fly on the wall watching freewheeling, vulnerable reunion among old friends, is the draw here.

There’s a laudable shagginess to all of that. The loose atmosphere of the gathering at the Coopers’ South Carolina home is inviting, even as it’s draped in tragedy. There’s a tension at play in every scene, with lingering regrets and resentments filtering through each conversation, and a friend’s suicide hanging over each interaction. But there’s also a familiarity, a sense in which these people haven't seen one another in a long time, but can so easily fall back into old patterns and dynamics, which speaks to the meaning each still holds in their admittedly frayed connections. In a word, despite a sense of heightened reality, The Big Chill feels real.

What’s interesting is that the characters aren’t that well-developed or distinguished. You get a thumbnail sense of each of them, little quirks and snippets of their personalities -- little hints of who they are and what makes them tick. William Hurt’s Nick is the closest thing to an exception and a perspective character, getting some deeper fleshing out of his backstory and point-of-view. For the most part, though, the gang at the Coopers’ place are quirky archetypes as much as anything.

Despite that, the performances are so good, the rapport among the actors is so good, and the lived-in quality of everything we see means that doesn’t really matter. You get the sense that there’s more to each of these people than we see on the screen, parts of their lives and psyches we’re not privy to, but we get just enough of a suggestion of those things to buy that there’s more of the iceberg below the surface.

To the point, it’s impressive how well Kasdan and co-writer Barbara Benedek are able to repeatedly mix and match the characters over the course of the film without running into trouble. Every pairing has their own dynamic, their own inside jokes, their own festering grudges, their own particular back-and-forth. It speaks well of what the pair constructed that each interaction has its own character and quality, which speaks to the depth of the relationships at play, if not necessarily the characters.

Much of the banter between them is charming and/or hilarious. That’s the film’s secret weapon. The Big Chill is about eight people who are, at least in part, some combination of mixed up or unhappy. With the wrong approach, it could be a bleak movie. But the crew is quick with a joke. They know how to make one another laugh or smile. They rib each other with endearing abandon. Jeff Goldblum’s character, Michael, is a pitiful cad, but his every line is a stitch. And there’s genuine joy and fun here, from dancing together while cleaning up the kitchen, to doing joke interviews on a camcorder, to a goofy tussling game of football on the lawn.

You need that levity to balance out the gravitas here. This is, after all, a group of people brought together for their shared mourning of a suicide. There’s a fascinating set of reactions to such an unfortunate end, from Glenn Close’s Sarah grieving an estranged lover, to Tom Berenger’s Sam wishing he could have been there for his friend in need, to Nick trying to disclaim the supposed closeness of their group’s friendship given how they’ve drifted apart over the years.

With that, there’s a melancholy that laces the film, not just in the cause of this impromptu reunion, but in the fact that life took these good friends in different directions, and weakened the bonds between them, in the way that life just does sometimes. There’s hope here, in a film self-consciously grappling with a loss of hope, that they’ll write and keep in touch for real this time. But as the post-fling return to normalcy for Sam and JoBeth Williams’ Karen, this could also just be a blissful but fleeting oasis before they return to the 1980s status.

That’s the other big theme here -- the sense that all these bright-eyed dreamer and self-styled revolutionaries had big plans for their lives when they were in college. Fifteen years out, they’ve ended up in very different places than they expected, having sold out, settled down, or otherwise fallen short of the impact they hoped to have on the world. There is truth in that too, one that cuts across eras and generations, and can still be keenly felt decades later.

Which is why the plot free, hang-out movie energy works here. The Big Chill has plenty going for it in terms of style and charm. It sports an incredible soundtrack. It has an inviting setting in a Carolina summer home. And it has an enervating vibe, to where it’s easy to feel like the ninth friend in the posse, chilling and reminiscing with the rest of them.

But what it has most, outside of the bonkers turns in the last act, is that sense of truth, in the bright moments of joy, in the reflective moments of loss, in the late night introspection, and in the resolutions and rationalizations that come through in equal measure from these eight friends banding together once more. The Big Chill isn’t like most other films. But with all of that, it doesn’t have to be.