Limbo it

Rating: 7/10 (20 September 2019)

Pennywise the Clown calls himself "The Eater of Worlds". The same can be said about writer/director whose "The Big Chill" is a near-remake of "The Return of the Secaucus Seven", the debut feature film by John Sayles, made four years earlier. The filmmaker, to this day, sticks by his claim that he had no prior knowledge of Sayles' micro-budgeted indie, despite both films having carbon copy premises. Seven thirty-something adults who formed a clique during their hippie years at college, reunite at a summer house and gripe about the agony of being yuppie sellouts. The only difference is that in "The Big Chill", the ex-countercultural warriors return under somber circumstances, a memorial service for their friend Alex Marshall(Kevin Costner), the diehard who accepted too late that the dream was over. Since Costner didn't survive the final cut, the body in the coffin can be anyone or anything you want it to be; the body, for cineastes, is a filmic body, "The Return of the Secaucus Seven", a celluloidal twin that few people knew about. After Harold Cooper(Kevin Kline) delivers the eulogy, Karen Bowen(JoBeth Williams) takes her place at the organ and plays Alex's favorite song, The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want". For the dead, it's happiness. For the writer/director John Sayles, it's credit. At the gravesite, Nick(William Hurt) has to wrangle Meg(Mary Kay Place), who walks in the opposite direction of the ceremonial plot, but she gets there, and says goodbye to the deceased before they lower the coffin. On an extra-diegetical level, it looks as if Alex's friends are hiding the body; a secret pact made by these Secaucus Seven dopplegangers. The camera pulls back from the burial site. "The Big Chill" is fleeing from the scene of the crime. It's a pet cemetery of sorts. "IT: Volume Two" brings "The Return of the Secaucus Seven" back to life. Call it creative license; call it whatever you like, but something went down in 1983 and "The Big Chill" is the only suspect.
Echoes of "The Big Chill abound in "IT", Stephen King's magnum opus, released three years after ******'s requiem for the baby boomer generation. There are fortune cookies in "The Big Chill". The fortune cookies inform "IT: Chapter Two". Over brunch, Karen regales her college pals with her recent Hawaiian adventure. At a local Chinese restaurant, girlfriends in tow, she encountered this very disturbing fortune: "You'll never amount to anything." Sarah Cooper(Glenn Close), Harold's wife, responds: "I don't believe it." The operative word is "it". The menace followed Karen back to South Carolina. "The Big Chill" works as a human horror film; it's the idealism of their activist-oriented youth coming back to haunt them. Michael(Jeff Goldblum) reads his fortune: "Friendship is the bread of life, but money is the honey." Again, it's Sarah who replies. "Even fortune cookies are getting cynical," she says. Cynical like them, their older selves; capitalists all, with mortgages, fancy cars, and stock options. The fortune cookie is the elephant in the room. Alex's foolish idealism is what killed him. Neither Michael, who wrote an article in their college newspaper about the physics whiz turning down the Rutledge fellowship, nor Sarah, who knew him in the biblical sense, comment on Alex's epiphany, a belated dawning attributable to his suicide, that the fortune cookie message accurately prophesized. The fortune cookies in Andy Muschietti's "IT: Chapter Two" are blunter. The Derry kids, all grown up, catch up on old times at Jade of the Orient, a Chinese restaurant, after Mike Hanlon(Isiah Mustafa) calls them back home when the cyclical nature of their haunted town's child murders rejuvenates itself, right on schedule. Instead of a fortune, The Loser Club members receive single words that they recombine in vain to form a coherent sentence. The missing link, a proper noun, that Beverly Marsh(Jessica Chastain) grips between her fingers, is added to the group fray over meaning. Beverly organizes the jumble of words: "Guess Stanley could not cut it." Pennywise(Bill Skarsgard) ensures that the elephant in the room is accounted for. Stanley Uris(Andy Bean), just like Alex, slit his wrists in a bathtub. The fortune cookies act as a conduit between both films. One cookie contains a bat wing. Are there bats in "The Big Chill"? Yes. The group hears Chloe scream and rush up the stairs to her room. One cookie contains an eyeball attached to octopi-like tentacles. Does the human organ and mollusk in concert also make an appearance in "The Big Chill"? Yes. Nick watches, on television, a black and white movie in which men ward off a giant octopus from boarding their destroyer with blowtorches. The scene comes from Robert Gordon's "IT Came from Beneath the Sea". Muschietti riffs, with or without the source material as a guide. Every generation, Pennywise returns to Derry. In the 1983 film, Harold, the shoe company impresario, and Sam Weber(Tom Berenger), a Tom Selleck-like television actor, make the bed, and as they straighten out the sheets, we learn that Sarah's husband plans to open up his "twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth" store. Twenty-seven is the magic number; twenty-seven years is how long it takes for the clown to awaken from his hibernation.
As the popular wisdom went, "IT" was unadaptable for the big screen, due to the graphic violence that Pennywise committed against minors. With the rare exception, such as John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13(1976), in which a little girl gets shot in the chest near an ice cream truck, the onscreen annihilation of a child was rare. The body count in the Stephen King novel proved to be a major stumbling block. Original programming on HBO and other cable outlets, not to mention, online streaming services, were options unavailable to the group who bought from King the film rights, so "IT" was brought to network television and condensed into an abridged two-part miniseries, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. The iconic scene, in which a yellow slickered boy negotiates and loses not just the paper boat, but his life, looks downright Disneyesque when measured against the no-holds barred standards of violence in contemporary moviemaking. It's a bloodless scene. Pennywise(Tim Curry) grabs Georgie's arm and bares his sharp teeth, and then a dissolve to an eagle-eye shot of the boy's flower-laden casket. The blood is dislocated to a black and white picture of Georgie in Bill's photo album, drenched with oozing red body fluid. Georgie's blood, in "IT", remains pooled on a rain-soaked street. This time, when Pennywise grabs the boy, there is no dissolve. The audience is confronted with, albeit fantasy, the intimacy of a frenzied child in jeopardy, rendered in a graphic honesty that was once deemed unthinkable. The clown has Georgie's arm firmly clamped in its jaws. There is a cut. We're spared the cleaving of his arm. But the surgery is implied, when we see the boy crawling away from the storm drain with a missing limb, before being dragged back by an alien-like elongated arm. Pennywise, in "IT: Chapter Two", bites the face of a sad friendless little girl under the bleachers, and then, at a carnival, he breaks through a fun house mirror and eviscerates a boy in front of Bill Denbrough(James McAvoy), who is shielded from the carnage by arterial spray that coats the glass in red entire. Is this necessary? Isn't suggestive violence enough? Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Pennywise is anything and anyone; he can shapeshift into both monsters and people. Georgie Denbrough(Jackson Robert Scott) is the clown's favorite bit of mimicry, because it tortures Bill, who is coerced into a guilt-ridden admission of health on that fateful rainy day. As Beverly Marsh(Sophia Lillis), in a flashback, Pennywise adopts the girl's feminine wiles and fools Ben Hanscom(Jeremy Ray Taylor) into leaning in for a kiss. The clown can also transcend time and space; it has the ability to subsume the two-dimensional body of Bill's mother in a film slide, and when the projector's rapid-fire motion turn the slides into a home movie, the clown goes 3D and vacates the filmic world. It goes after Beverly. It can be anywhere and do anything, such as take celluloidal form. Beverly lives close to a glen. The clown, hypothetically, could be Glenn Close, whose Sarah Cooper can be, at times, mercurical. This is when. The old woman(Joan Gregson) who lives in the Marsh's old apartment, stops moving, freezes, as if her batteries suddenly ran out, while having a cup of tea with Beverly, before resuming her rote niceties. In "The Big Chill", Sarah stands motionless in front of an open refrigerator; she chooses nothing, as if she forgot what it takes to be human. During Alex's wake, at the buffet table, she tells Michael: "We give first preference to people who kill themselves in one of our bathrooms." That's a mean thing to say; that's Pennywise.
In the made-for-television version of "IT", Ben(John Ritter) says: "Limbo, how low can you go?" as he ducks under an aluminum rolling door. "Limbo" was a 1999 film directed by John Sayles. Georgie could have caught up with his boat if he did the limbo instead of hitting his forehead on a road closure sign.
"The Return of the Secaucus Seven" fought its way out of the pinebox and dirt.
And returned as a construction batter.