Watching ‘The Big Chill’ Will Remind You of Your Own Capacity For Joy

One of my favorite tapes as a kid was the Big Chill soundtrack. How could it not have been? It’s an oldies juggernaut, almost toothache-inducing with its hits on hits on hits. But I never saw the actual film until now, My First Time. My first scary realization? At age 35, I’m the same age as its ensemble cast was when the film came out, way back in 1983.

I’m a willing conscript in the prolonged bitching skirmish between Boomers and Millennials, so it’s with some contrition that I admit that this cornerstone of the Boomer Canon floored me with its excellence. Good Boomer art has this insane power to make younger people nostalgic for a time they didn’t experience. The Big Chill‘s world is so lived-in, and its characters so natural, that it made me wonder if the film had existed somewhere in my consciousness all along. Have all of my weekend getaways with friends been subliminally based on The Big Chill?

Quick scene-setting for those who haven’t seen it: It is 1983, and a group of friends from the University of Michigan have reunited at the funeral for a friend who committed suicide. On a whim they decide to spend the whole weekend together, at the summer home of Harold and Sarah, played by Kevin Kline and Glenn Close. The cast includes William Hurt as a cocaine-addicted Vietnam veteran and former radio shrink, Jeff Goldblum (iconic then, as now) as a womanizing hack writer who plays as quaintly unthreatening by today’s standards, and Mary Kay Place as a lawyer who is determined to get pregnant, despite being single.

The Big Chill‘s screenplay is unassailable. The comedy is like a meandering stream, emerging from the loose, playful banter that develops from decades of friendship. Some friend-reunions open up a temporary portal to a better world, where everyone lets themselves be more loving, funnier and more honest — their best selves. You miss that feeling even as you’re in it; you think to yourself, why can’t it be like this all the time? The Big Chill conjures this feeling with breathtaking precision, and watching it reminds you of your own capacity for joy.

The film’s emotional peak comes at the end of the gang’s first big meal together, when Kevin Kline puts on music and they all start dancing while tidying up the kitchen. The spectacular dorkiness of the dancing is beside the point — this scene contains a universe. The Boomers were raised in a rigidly gendered society, which they began to dismantle in the 1960s and ’70s. By the ’80s, if this film is to be believed, men and women hung out as friends and equals. While contemporary ensemble comedies tend to lean heavily on sexual awkwardness for laughs, it’s striking how generous and unbothered The Big Chill is about sexuality in general.

This film is about adults, which is another striking contrast to ensemble comedies today. Ever since Knocked Up, wide-release comedies have been mining questions of maturity for material. Most likely it’s a reflection of the precarious times we live in. Regardless, 1983 appears to have been a good time to be a fully independent, job-having, choice-making human adult. The characters are enjoying the world they have remade after taking apart their parents’. That they were able to do this and also get rich —I’m talking about the movie’s characters, but also the actual Boomers— must have been pretty sweet.

Because yeah, these characters are what were once pejoratively known as “yuppies,” and they remind today’s viewers that there was a time not too long ago when it was considered vaguely uncool to be rich. Can you imagine having had the luxury to be like, “I feel bad about this money!” I… can’t! The one place where the screenplay lost me emotionally was when the characters lament having lost touch with “what really matters” on their pathways to success.

“Good Boomer art has this insane power to make younger people nostalgic for a time they didn’t experience.”

When the afterglow faded from watching The Big Chill, I felt a bit bereft. At what historical moment was the world the most engaged with social justice? When were the highest percentage of humans healthy and safe? Sometimes I try to puzzle through this question as a kind of masochistic game. Technologists insist that we’ve yet to reach this moment of justice-for-most, and I hope they’re right. I hope the best is yet to come for the 80% of earth that still lives on under 10 dollars a day. I hope the best is yet to come for the massive majority of the earth’s humans who have been screwed over by a sedimentary system of overlapping forms of oppression.  

But I suspect that The Big Chill‘s demographic —college-educated white Americans, the demographic to which it is my privilege to belong— barreled right past their peak moment of well-being without even noticing it go by. And I think it might have been the moment that Kevin Kline takes out that Temptations record, kisses the cover, and cues up “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg.”  

Kathryn Jezer-Morton is a writer in Montreal.

Watch The Big Chill on Amazon Prime