Old Yorker

  • The Big Chill

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lawrence Kasdan (1983)

    The Big Chill is about eight people spending the weekend together following the funeral of a man called Alex, who was important in the lives of them all.  For seven of the eight, it’s a reunion:  now in their mid-thirties, they and Alex were students together at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s.  The other member of the gathering is Alex’s partner Chloe, ten or more years younger than the rest.  When they were at university Alex led by example in stimulating the leftish politics of Harold, Sarah, Sam, Karen, Michael and Meg.  At the time of his death, he was staying with Chloe – trying to figure out what to do with his life – at a property owned by Harold and Sarah (now a married couple), whose home is the setting for the post-mortem weekend.  Alex’s loss of purpose and suicide – he slit his wrists – appear to be symbolic of the death of the others’ radicalism, and, indeed, the radicalism of the counterculture generation as a whole.   This is one of the smart things about the picture:  it’s self-indulgent – sometimes it comes over as little more than a pretext for Lawrence Kasdan to pile favourite sixties hits on the soundtrack – but it’s aware that its primary, thirty-something, target audience is going to be complicit in the self-indulgence.  And Kasdan gives the audience (and himself) a pleasant time.  In addition to the nostalgic pull and lift of the songs, the movie is only very mildly regretful about the discrepancy between youthful idealism and approaching-middle-aged reality.

    The title[1] and the opening minutes of the film – Alex’s funeral and his friends’ immediate reactions to their loss – suggest that The Big Chill is going to be much more about the reality of death, and the premature and shocking death of a contemporary, than it turns out to be.  Kasdan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Barbara Benedek, might argue that this is because the people in his story can’t or won’t face up to what’s happened but their evasiveness is nothing if not convenient from the director’s point of view.  This applies to the writing more generally.  Nearly each character gets their turn summarising what they feel about how their life is turning out – essentially in monologue but with occasional exchanges with another character on the subject.  This ‘serious’ writing is stagy and clichéd and the actors, good as they are, can rarely do much with the speeches; they’re more comfortable when the dialogue is lighter – sometimes archly jocose, sometimes witty.  Again, Kasdan might like to think that the recurrent slide away from solemnity into intelligent jokiness makes an important point about the characters but it’s hard to ignore the coincidence that their avoiding the issue gets the man behind the camera off the hook and back into his comfort zone too.

    Although they may, with varying degrees of force and frequency, express dissatisfaction with the lives they’ve built, most of the group have done well for themselves:  Sam is the star of a hugely popular television drama; Harold is a successful businessman (he owns a chain of stores that sell running shoes); Sarah is a doctor;  Michael gave up social work in Harlem for a lucrative career in journalism; Meg is a lawyer; Karen, although she’s especially resentful of her lot, is married to an advertising executive.  She also has two children, as do Harold and Sarah.  The unmarried, childless Meg ends up happy with the prospect of becoming pregnant.  The one professional failure in the group is Nick, a former psychologist who now gets his income from drug-dealing.  Angry and antisocial, he’s also impotent, as a result of injuries sustained in Vietnam.  Lawrence Kasdan seems to be much easier writing about himself or aspects of himself than trying to imagine or bring to life different kinds of experience.  He has a sure touch in the exchanges between Harold and Sam (when they’re making up a bed in one of the guest rooms, for example) and in all-boys-together routines like the swatting of bats that have scared the women.  It’s surely no accident that the decidedly unhappy Nick is the most artificially conceived male role and that the women aren’t fully-rounded characters but represent, very schematically, dilemmas facing their sex at the time.  Sarah, in spite of a fling with Alex which threatens (but only threatens) to raise questions about her marriage, is (a) an accomplished wife and mother with (b) an independent career.  Karen is (a) but lacks (b).  Meg has (b) but isn’t (a).  (Chloe – a generational gatecrasher – falls outside this scheme, of course.)

    Among a fine cast, I especially liked Kevin Kline.  Harold is potentially dull:  he’s one of the most contented members of the group, a loving husband and father, unashamed of his commercially successful life.  Kline’s portrait is anything but dull:  it’s a lovely balance of quiet naturalism and drily zany readings – with telling flashes of the physical comedy élan which made him a legendary Pirate King in the Central Park The Pirates of Penzance in the 1970s.  As Michael, Jeff Goldblum is sufficiently idiosyncratic, vocally and gesturally, to make the character’s bottomless egotism reasonably amusing.  Tom Berenger is skilful and charming in gradually revealing that Sam is more complicatedly shallow than you’d assumed (though he’s still shallow).  In spite of the role of Nick, William Hurt is physically very convincing in it and he often gives his lines a surprising, refreshing spin. Even allowing for Sarah’s noble generosity, Glenn Close is pretty annoying in the part – there’s something superior in her acting.  Although Sarah smiles a lot, she seems to lack the sense of humour of her husband and their houseguests and I wasn’t sure this was intentional.  JoBeth Williams is preferable as Karen, even if not good enough to disguise the fact that this bitter woman seems, more than any other character, to belong in a TV soap.  Meg Tilly does well as Chloe and Mary Kay Place gets stronger and stronger as the wryly obstinate Meg:  you find yourself rooting for her in her quest to get one of the men to impregnate her.  As Karen’s adman husband Richard (he leaves the wake early to get back to their kids), Don Galloway, known to me only through his long-running role as Raymond Burr’s sidekick in Ironside, is effective – not least perhaps because the line between the squareness of the character and the squareness of the actor is so blurred.  (One of the few real weak spots in the acting is Ken Place, in a cameo as a policeman who comes to Harold’s house on the point of arresting Nick but who capitulates once he recognises Sam from television.)

    The Big Chill is so neatly constructed that it’s often pat – in the way the characters are introduced, in the climax of home truths outbursts on the group’s last evening together, in the patterned sexual encounters that follow (and the pop songs seem increasingly to be used just to underline what’s on screen, which detracts from the pleasure of listening to them).  Kasdan’s direction is slick but there’s not enough going on beneath or around the dialogue – in spite of the good performances, what you hear is mostly what you get.  (The film plays like an extended, highly polished sitcom with soap interruptions:  I wondered off and on what the movie might have been if Robert Altman had directed.)   The images are rarely interesting, although the way Kasdan choreographs Alex’s funeral cortege is one of the rarities.  April Ferry’s costumes are unobtrusively right – especially for Meg (trying to be casual and ending up frumpy) and Karen (silk blouses that show she still means business). For all its limitations and pervasive complacency, I prefer The Big Chill to both the other Kasdan films I’ve seen (Body Heat and The Accidental Tourist).  Performers as in tune with each other and relaxed as this get you to believe that the characters go back a long way – and give you an idea of what made them friends in the first place.   The cast are evidently enjoying each other’s company but this isn’t a case of happy actors having all the fun:  the buzz they’re getting from good ensemble playing is infectious.

    23 February 2010

    [1] According to MSN Encarta ‘big chill’ means ‘death or utter misery: … a near-death experience, or a state of perilous misery (slang)’.

  • The Best Years of Our Lives

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1946)

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Best Years of Our Lives, although the competition is keen, is that this story of three World War II servicemen returning to civilian life was completed and released as early as November 1946.  Samuel Goldwyn read a Time piece in August 1944 about the difficulties experienced by ex-servicemen and commissioned a treatment from a former war correspondent, Mackinlay Kantor, who produced a novella called Glory For Me (in blank verse), which Robert E Sherwood turned into the screenplay for William Wyler’s picture.  The Best Years of Our Lives was a huge commercial success and won seven Oscars.  If you Google posters for the movie you’ll find one that declares it to be ‘The Most Honored Picture of Our Time! … The Best Loved Picture of All Time!’   David Thomson ‘would concede that Best Years is decent and humane… acutely observed, despite being so meticulous a package’.  Pauline Kael finds ‘something absorbing about the banality of its large-scale good intentions; it’s compulsively watchable’.   In the 2012 top-10-of-all-time lists in Sight & Sound, the film was included by six critics and three directors, among them Francis Ford Coppola.

    The Best Years of Our Lives begins with the return of the three servicemen to their homes in a place called Boone City, supposedly modelled on Cincinnati.  For me, these homecomings were emotionally very powerful – partly because they made me think of what it might have been like for my father to come back to my mother and to York after four years as a POW, partly because William Wyler stages them very skilfully.  The local life glimpsed and the street sounds heard by the soldiers from inside the car they’re travelling in are made both familiar and newly-minted.  This commingling of things remembered and strange to the men is sustained once they’re back inside their homes and seeing their wives and families.  It’s hard to overstate how strongly many people in 1946 must have identified with the story as a whole and with these sequences in particular – especially as the film arrived in cinemas when the audience’s own memories of the previous year were still so fresh in their minds.  For people struggling to readapt to civilian life it obviously wasn’t necessary even to rely on memory.

    The film is schematic in various respects:  the trio represent each of the three armed forces and each man must cope with a particular type of legacy from the war.  The navy man, Homer Parrish, has been physically disabled.  The decorated airforce pilot, Fred Derry, has to go back to working in a drugstore.  The platoon sergeant, Al Stephenson, returns to a job in a bank which includes approving or not approving loans to other war veterans.  But these situations are detailed, and the characters written and played, in ways that transcend the schematism.  The three men didn’t know each other before the War.  They meet on a plane flying home, and they don’t expect to see each other again once they’re back in Boone City.  The happily married Al Stephenson celebrates in a local bar with his wife and daughter on the night of his return.  When he bumps into Fred Derry there, Fredric March expresses Al’s delighted surprise so well that he makes the instant reunion more than plausible.

    Al gets back home from Butch’s Bar considerably the worse for wear and March’s playing of this drunk scene and the next morning’s hangover is a masterpiece.  At the same time, he’s completely convincing as someone who works in a bank.  It’s a great performance.   Dana Andrews’s portrait of Fred is admirably disciplined:  he avoids sentimentality, in spite of the opportunities to indulge in it, and suggests very well, but not obviously, the erosion of Fred Derry’s self-belief back in Boone City.  Harold Russell, who plays Homer, was not a professional actor but really did lose his hands in World War II (while he was making a training film with the US 13th Airborne Division a defective fuse detonated an explosive that Russell was handling).  If you’re aware of these things, it’s hard not to view Russell’s contribution to the film in a different light.  He can act, however, so casting him in the role of Homer doesn’t come across as awkwardly exploitative.

    Myrna Loy shows plenty of wit as Al’s wife Milly – she and March are a very credible married couple – but the younger women are less well served by the script.  The role of Homer’s loyal girlfriend Wilma, played by Cathy O’Donnell, is thin and although Virginia Mayo is animated as Fred’s trampy wife Marie, the character is conceived in a censorious, puritanical way.  As Al and Milly’s daughter Peggy, Teresa Wright is less pious than usual and good in her early scenes with Dana Andrews:  as the relationship between Peggy and Fred intensifies and – because he’s a married man – creates tensions with her parents, Wright becomes more conventional.  Peggy’s teenage brother Rob (Michael Hall) is a feeble role – the character is more or less dropped after the opening scenes.

    William Wyler’s storytelling is clear and he gives The Best Years of Our Lives, which runs nearly three hours, an effortless momentum.  Wyler also allows some scenes between two characters, especially Al and Milly, to continue for what seems a daringly long time, and these are thoroughly rewarding.   The film does make some obvious liberal points but not everything is resolved in the way you expect.  When he bridles in public against the hard-nosed attitude of his boss (Ray Collins) towards loans for ex-servicemen, you expect Al to lose his job but life isn’t so simple.  He stays at the bank and you get a sense of the abrasive effect that his continuing misgivings will have on Al’s working life.

    28 December 2012

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