The Big Chill

Plot synopsis:
Harold Cooper (Kevin Kline) is bathing his young son when his wife, Sarah (Glenn Close), receives a phone call at their Richmond home telling her that their friend, Alex, has committed suicide by slashing his wrists in the bathtub of their vacation house in South Carolina, where he had been staying.
At the funeral, Harold and Sarah are reunited with college friends from the University of Michigan. They include Sam (Tom Berenger), a famous television actor now living in Los Angeles; Meg (Mary Kay Place), a chain smoking former public defender who is now a real estate attorney in Atlanta and wants a child; Michael (Jeff Goldblum), a sex-obsessed People magazine journalist; Nick (William Hurt), a Vietnam War veteran and former radio host who suffers from impotence; Karen (JoBeth Williams), a housewife from suburban Detroit who's unhappy in her marriage to her advertising executive husband, Richard (Don Galloway). Also present is Chloe (Meg Tilly), Alex's much younger girlfriend.
After the burial, everyone goes from the cemetery to Harold and Sarah's vacation house, where they are invited to stay for the weekend. During the first night there, a bat flies into the attic while Meg and Nick are getting reacquainted. Sam later finds Nick watching television, and they briefly talk about Karen. The two then go into the kitchen and find Richard making a sandwich, and the three make small talk which turns into a discussion about responsibility and adulthood. At the end of the discussion, Richard states, "Nobody said it was going to be fun. At least, nobody said it to me."
The next morning Harold and Nick go jogging. Harold tells Nick that his running shoe company is about to be bought out by a large corporation, and that he's about to become rich. Harold confides in Nick that Sarah and Alex had an affair five years earlier. Nick comforts Harold by saying, "She didn't marry Alex."
Richard returns home to look after his kids, but Karen decides to stay in South Carolina for the weekend. Nick, Harold, Michael and Chloe go for a drive (while "Good Lovin'" by the Rascals plays on the car radio), while Sam and Karen go shopping. Meg reveals to Sarah that she wants to have a child, and that she is going to ask Sam to be the father, knowing now that Nick can't. Out in the countryside, Harold listens to Michael's plans to buy a nightclub. Chloe takes Nick to the abandoned house that she and Alex were going to renovate. She tells him that he reminds her of Alex, to which Nick replies, "I ain't him."
During dinner, Sarah starts tearing up over Alex as the group talks about him. Harold puts "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" by the Temptations on the stereo, and everyone dances while cleaning up the dishes. While the others sit around and smoke marijuana, Meg asks Sam to father her baby, but he declines.
The next morning Nick, Sam and Harold go jogging, and the subject of Alex's suicide comes up again. Harold's surprise arrives: sneakers for everyone to wear during the upcoming Michigan football game. The group, minus Nick, watches the game on TV, while Sarah tells Karen about her brief affair with Alex and how it affected their friendship negatively.
During the game, Michael offers to father Meg's child, alluding to the fact that they had sex in college during the March on Washington. At halftime, Chloe, Sam, Harold and Michael go outside to play touch football. Nick returns, with a police car following him. The officer says that Nick ran a red light and was belligerent, but says that he will drop the charges if Sam would hop into Nick's Porsche as his TV character, J. T. Lancer, always does. Sam is unsuccessful and hurts himself, but the officer drops the charges anyway and apologizes to Harold.
Karen later tells Sam that she loves him, wants to leave Richard and live with Sam and her two sons. When they kiss, Sam pulls away and tells Karen not to leave Richard, as she will regret it in the long run. He confesses that it was "boredom" that caused his own marriage to fail, and he doesn't want her to make the same mistake. Karen feels misled and angrily storms into the house.
Harold is on the phone with his daughter, Molly, and lets Meg talk to her. Observing their interaction on the phone, Sarah decides to let Harold impregnate Meg, but does not tell him yet.
The group once again discusses Alex. Nick says, "Alex died for most of us a long time ago," but Sam disagrees and leaves. Karen follows him, and the two have sex outside. Sarah tells Harold about Meg's situation, while Chloe and Nick go to bed together, even though he warns her of his condition. Meg and Harold then have sex – she says "I feel like I got a great break on a used car" – while Michael and Sarah joke around and interview each other with a video camera.
In the morning while Karen is packing her clothes, she subtly tells Sam that she has decided to stay with Richard. At the breakfast table, Harold reveals that Nick and Chloe will be staying in the guest house for a while so they can renovate the old abandoned house. Sam and Nick then make up from their argument the night before. Nick gives Michael an old copy of an article he wrote about Alex back in college. At the end of the movie, Michael states, tongue in cheek, "Sarah, Harold. We took a secret vote. We're not leaving. We're never leaving." They all laugh and "Joy to the World" plays as the credits roll.

Tags: cult

Review:
"The Big Chill" is often regarded as the best Hollywood movie to demonstrate ensemble acting.
A problem that can affect similar films is the unequal division of time that each character receives, but "The Big Chill" avoids this problem.
Some of the careers of the talented cast bloomed after this- Kevin Kline won an Oscar for "A Fish Called Wanda", Glenn Close got 5 nominations (this film included) and got a status in Hollywood, Jeff Goldblum got success in the likes of "Jurassic Park" and "Independence Day".
It is the single best combination of acting, film editing, sound track, dialogue, and every other thing that goes into a movie, ever put together.
After a decade in the work-a-day world, being a family man and raising babies, watching "The Big Chill" was like a fantastic time machine and took me back to places long forgotten.
"The Big Chill" is still a very good movie; you have to love it for the ensemble acting.
That is of course, the plot of the movie.7 friends (who go wayyy back) one husband (who disappears pretty quickly) and a widowed girlfriend (who is barely known by anyone) come together after they learn that Alex, a friend formally part of the clique, had committed suicide (this part was infamously played by Kevin Costner).
As a member of Gen-X having just revisited this movie after several years, I have to say that the soundtrack took me down "memory lane" in a big way, and may be one of the best things about The Big Chill.
Music can make or break a movie, and in The Big Chill, the music is an integral part of the film, as important as the cast, the writing and the directing.
I had to look The Big Chill up on the internet to be reminded of the general story line, but the music has stayed with me all these years, and will remain with me, from the first notes of Joy to the World through the rest of the soundtrack and back.
I'm from Michigan, and while I didn't go to UM, I went to a state school in Michigan in the early seventies, and this was my life.This movie has both *everyone* I ever knew in it, and all the best actors of the time.
Reunions of former college mates can be an enthusiastic, but also dramatic experience, mainly when you have shared with your now adult friends great ideals in a better and just world, and all those ideals have been abandoned in favour of professional careers and wealthy lives and, moreover, when the only mate who has faced the unfillable gap between the ideal and the real has just committed suicide and thus caused that same reunion.
Not to mention the soundtrack, which contributes strongly to the emotional impact of the movie and makes one feel like rediscovering the great and out of time hits of the 60's, 70's.
The original screenplay included scenes with Alex, who was played by Kevin Costner, but, in a stroke of genius, it was decide to delete all of the Alex scenes in the film, lending a wonderful air of mystery to the character of Alex and allowing the audience more input as to why Alex decided to end his life.
Alex's friends are Harold Cooper (Kevin Kline), who now owns a shoe store franchise and his doctor-wife, Sarah (Glenn Close), who also serve as our hosts ; Michael (Jeff Goldblum), a writer for PEOPLE magazine; Meg (Mary Kay Place)an attorney who wants to have a baby; Sam (Tom Berenger) an actor with his own TV show who misses the simple life; Karen (JoBeth Williams), a restless housewife who would really like to be a writer and Nick (William Hurt) a drug dealer who would like to be anything else.
"The Big Chill" has something in common with another movie from the early eighties, Barry Levinson's "Diner" from 1981, which also deals with a reunion of a group of former classmates, although that film is a period piece set in 1959 and the characters are rather younger, being in their twenties rather than their thirties.
What the two films have in common is that both are excellent examples of ensemble acting.This was the second film of its director Lawrence Kasdan (his first was the very different neo-noir thriller "Body Heat") and it starred a number of actors, such as William Hurt and Kevin Kline, who were to become regulars in Kasdan's movies.
There are too may good performances to list them all, but special mentions must go to Kline as Harold, Glenn Close as Sarah and Meg Tilly as Alex's strange, unworldly younger girlfriend Chloe.
The piece ends suddenly, with little changed, nothing concluded and the audience thinking "So what?"   We never find out why Alex killed himself but my theory is he realized that these people were the best he could do for friends so he threw in the towel.As for the soundtrack, a selection of fifteen or so different numbers of roughly the same period, well K-Tel have been doing that sort of thing for years.
Like most members of my generation (portrayed in this film) "The Big Chill" is self-centered, egotistical, puerile, vapid, and ultimately chillingly bad.Chillingly because so many of my generation believe it to be poignant and meaningful, a beautiful slice of life, and, thus believing, hearken the beginning of the dumbing of America, where the childlike, puerile, and simplistic can be raised to the level of art.The film is not even entertaining for bad art.
It is the type of movie that you just don't see anymore and the characters and situations are touching, bittersweet, and quite true to life.Anyone who likes movies about real people and friendships that can withstand just about anything will love this movie.
"The Big Chill" is a simple story that involves a group of old friends who reunite after hearing the news that Alex, a close friend has committed suicide.
The other characters like the lawyer, the writer for People magazine and the movie star...how genuinely involved were they in the 1960's movement?
A lot of baby boom audiences have responded bitterly about this film because it seems so personal and yet they cannot relate to the characters, and therefore they feel fooled, tricked or envious of these characters." The Big Chill" does not speak for an entire generation and that is the problem.
I give the movie a B-.Things to watch for: cynical product placement (Miller Beer, Nike shoes, etc.); Meg Tilly's body; Kevin Kline's come-and-go accent..
A surprising Oscar's BEST PICTURE nominee, writer/director Lawrence Kasdan's sophomore feature THE BIG CHILL focuses on a weekend reunion of seven 30-something alumni of the University of Michigan, 15 years after leaving the ivory tower, but what convenes them together is anything but jovial, their friend Alex's shocking suicide.
The overhanging question shrouds the cohort of eight, joined by Chloe, Alex's much younger girlfriend, is what is the reason behind Alex's given up on his life, but like Alex himself, whom we are not privileged to see in his physical form (Kevin Costner is cast as Alex but all his scenes with his facial appearance are left in the editing room), it is elusive and open-ended, it might be just as well a spur-of-the-moment decision out of depression.
Pivoted around a ballast of camaraderie, nothing egregiously dark will emerge to tickle a cynical mind, Sarah (a radiant and Oscar-nominated Glenn Close in the mode of a good wife/mother which in retrospect appears at a premium in her tracking record) admits that she had an affair with Alex, which unfortunately dampens their friendship, before marrying Harold (Kevin Kline, full of panache), the ultimate version of an understanding and competent husband, who has no qualms at the bidding of her wife to become an inseminator of Meg (Mary Kay Place, embodies the career woman stereotype with considerable pizazz and tizzy), who adopts a modern view of independence and plans to become a single mother of her own accord when the biological clock starts ticking.
As per the likability quotient of their characters, in the descending order, the next-in-line is Karen (JoBeth Williams, a fine performance), a housewife forgoes her writing dreams to raise her children and gets bored with her stagnant marriage, the reunion tantalizingly rekindles her romance with her old admirer Sam (Tom Berenger, emits a refreshing air of forthright amiability and attractive unassumingness before being typecast in the villain compartment, for keeps), a well-known TV actor in L.A., divorced but sagacious enough not to wreck a family just for the old time's sake (after a mutually desired consummation, of course).
The Big Chill tells the story of eight friends who come together after the suicide of one of the best of them.
Glen Close, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Berenger, Kevin Kline, and William Hurt were the best.The movie defines a generation.
The Big Chill is a great film to watch when you are looking for happiness in a sad place.
[This would be a better story, I believe, and my interpretation of the movie would persuade me more if at least one of the characters acknowledged how much Meg resembles the hippies whom those of us old enough to have know hippies knew.]In my view, then, the cynical [Nick] is verbally worn down by the delusionals and won over by the realist [Chloe].
While The Big Chill is a good movie and is well acted fans should check out John Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven.
It's a great family movie OR a flick to watch partying with good friends.
Add Hollywood slickness, box office names, get the characters to dance to a great soundtrack with one of the best songs ever -- the Temptations with David Ruffin singing lead on "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" -- and you've got this 2 1/2-star thumb-stuck-firmly-in-the-middle melodrama.Big Chill probably ruins Secaucus 7 for anyone who sees this film first, but 7 is the better and more authentic film.
There's also the sad fact that movies like "The Big Chill" convinced a few addle-headed members of my demographic group (I was born in 1967) to try to create some kind of generational identity.
O.k. For those of you who aren't looking for an in depth analysis of the film, just want to know if it's worth watching, let me start out by saying the movie is worthless drivel.
Though the film has some great actors (And some of my favorite actors - Tom Berenger and Kevin Klein {sp?}) That is literally the only positive comment I have about this movie.
Unless you count that I've always had a thing for the dark-haired Jobeth Williams, kind of thought Glenn Close was pretty alluring in an offbeat sort of way, and enjoyed watching the pretty Meg Tilly doing her leg exercises.A real nothing of a film, despite the infusion of a kick-ass soundtrack of classic '60s tunes and the bumping of hips around the kitchen to the sounds of "Ain't Too Proud To Beg".
Sam (Tom Berenger) is a television star, Meg (Mary Kay Place) is a fine lawyer, Michael (Jeff Goldblum) writes for People Magazine, and Karen (JoBeth Williams) is a housewife with two small boys.
A bunch of college friends from the 1960s (Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Mary Kay place and Jobeth Williams) all get together in South Carolina for a friends funeral.
I was 21 and (maybe) too young to understand the problems these people were dealing with but the excellent acting (especially by Close), great direction, sharp script and wonderful soundtrack kept me entertained.
The film written (with Barbara Benedek) and directed by Lawrence Kasdan has reached icon status: it is as quality a memoir of baby boomer post college life that remains as poignant today as when it was released twenty seven years ago.
The group - Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, and Jobeth Williams interact philosophically, over food making in the kitchen of the Close/Kline home, share frustrations and fulfill expectations in both friendship and physical interactions.
Among them is Sam (Berenger), a notable TV actor; Michael (Goldblum), a magazine journalist; Meg (Place), a single real estate attorney; Nick (Hurt), a war veteran with a cocaine addiction; Chloe (Tilly), Alex's much younger girlfriend and finally Karen (Williams) and Richard, an unhappily married couple.
A lot has happened since the group had graduated and a lot can happen over the course of a weekend.While thematically very different than director Lawrence Kasdan's freshman effort Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill does show a similar affinity to character over story structure and pat resolutions.
But instead of the bitterness that was honestly realized in Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979) we get the upbeat vibes of "Jeremiah was a Bullfrog".All-in-all, The Big Chill is a decent film with fully realized characters worth following for an hour or two.
If you ever had a really tight knit group of school friends that you absolutely love and then spent years without them, this film will allow you to feel like you are having a reunion with your friends.
A group of seven former college friends gather for a weekend reunion at a South Carolina winter house after the funeral of one of their friends.In some ways, this film is something like "Secaucus Seven", with various friends who drifted apart getting back together again.
Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly & JoBeth Williams are efficient.On the whole, 'The Big Chill' is well-made film in all respects..
I just realized this!Harold tells the William Hurt character that the affair between Alex and Glen Close happened 5 years ago.
This probably the most quoted movie I know about, even today It starts out as the generation just before me in the Big Time Line Those "Kids" had their whole world turned upside down starting with the Kennedy Assignation and then moving on through Watergate....
It was a hit driven by good writing about somewhat believable humans, which is much less common in mainstream movies nowadays, especially ones with such a big name cast.And that fun, fun music doesn't hurt either.I agree that it may have been copied from "Return of the Seacaucus Seven" (which is fine in its own way), but see Chill anyway.
The Big Chill is one of those films that anyone who had a group of friends and aspirations from youth can easily relate to and better yet, enjoy!
This movie is definitely one of the best to come out of the 80's and goes to show the importance that friends have in a person's life.
After seeing the movie many times, it only occurred to me recently what the BIG CHILL really is...
and only because I finally and personally felt the big chill while recently watching the film.William Hurt's character is set up to be the next Alex and none of the characters in the film are "getting it".
The Big Chill has the ultimate 60s-70s soundtrack to match the changing moods and situations the characters have.Glenn Close got nominated for a Best Supporting Actress yet it seems almost
I would be more intrigued if they chose obscure songs from the time or even psychedelic instrumental music from the 60's.It's like if you did a movie about people who went to college in the 80's and the soundtrack was Duran Duran, Madonna, and Michael Jackson.
They stay behind for the weekend and reconnect with old drama and new issues.It's a feel good movie about a death and life from Lawrence Kasdan.
A cast of Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, and William Hurt really can't go wrong.
But really that's just one way of thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side, perhaps in years to come another film like The Big Chill will depict the reality of the 90's and show how the world has changed since then and then I'll feel all nostalgic.
That's a rare thing in a film, it's quite universal in it's message and it becomes a trip down memory lane no matter when you grew up; you find similarities in many things here.The Big Chill has it all; great story, great actors, great music; it's just a great movie..
The soundtrack is almost a comforting character of it's own.What can I say...this movie just makes you feel good..
Definitive for that timeframe and with 'all the goods' for a great film - which was not really possible to replicate in its follow-up (so much so I can't remember the title here).I had heard that Alex - the lost friend/corpse depicted with a chest shot at the beginning of the film - was played by Kevin Costner and that there was extra footage originally shot that included his character but it was all cut.
As I turn 23 and graduate from college, I find myself being able to relate to the characters in "The Big Chill." It has been one of my family's favorite movies of their generation.
He was the brightest of them all, yet never seemed to achieve as much as they have because he never "bought in to the system", as the film conveys.The thing I like best about "The Big Chill" is how each character has his or her own story to tell.
Till now those ideas about friendship, idealism, love, death and getting are present on my mind.It is a very sensitive movie and with a good Soundtrack.All the actors are in great performance.
And the incredible soundtrack remains one of the best uses of music in movies ever.It was this film that turned me on to a whole slew of superb actors.
Just grab this off the shelves and make ya self cumf'y - its a great 'Feel Good' movie with a difference, and has the most splendid cast - all of whom are now really big stars....
I love movies that make you think, that develop the characters thoroughly and that involve great ensemble acting...