40 Years Later, a Boomer Father and Millennial Son Revisit The Big Chill

Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 directorial follow-up to Body Heat, The Big Chill (get it?), focuses on a group of college protesters turned introspective thirty-somethings who reunite after the death of a friend. I certainly remembered The Big Chill fondly, in part because I watched it with my dad when I was 11. But considering this was an Oscar-nominated hit with two soundtrack albums (one of which made the top 20), time as well as generational hostility to the boomers hasn’t exactly been kind to it. American novelist T.C. Boyle mercilessly skewered the plot in his short story “The Little Chill.” In High Fidelity, when Dick (Todd Barry) disqualifies a Top 5 song because it was in The Big Chill, Barry (Jack Black) accepts the judgment with no rancor.  

Was The Big Chill really “Baby Boomer Santa” sans irony? Or is it just a fun hangout movie with universal themes even a millennial in their thirties can understand? When I visited him earlier this month, I asked my dad, a retired boomer himself, to sit and watch it again, 20 years later, so I could get some of his thoughts. Here are excerpts from our conversation during the film, albeit heavily edited for clarity.

The opening sequence is largely in montage, as the group of friends, including business owner Harold (Kevin Kline), his wife and doctor Sarah (Glenn Close), reporter Michael (Jeff Goldblum), TV actor Sam Weber (Tom Berenger), dropout Nick (William Hurt), lawyer Meg (Mary Kay Place), and businesswoman and mother Karen (JoBeth Williams) learn about Alex’s (Kevin Costner) suicide, and his body is prepared for the funeral.

C.M. Crockford: They were supposed to have Costner appear in a flashback, but Kasdan decided to cut the scene out. 

Dad: Yeah, it’s smarter anyway to learn about Alex rather than showing him.

Crockford: Oh yeah, it makes him more of a mystery.

 

Dad: [watching Meg on the plane] Heh, this is from when people drank like fish on airplanes.

 

Alex’s funeral is underway. We meet more characters there, including Karen’s “square” husband Richard (Don Galloway) and Alex’s younger girlfriend Chloe (Meg Tilly).

Crockford: Jesus, they’ve played three songs already.

Dad: So?

Crockford: Good music, but it’s really leaning on them. 

 

Crockford: What is Kevin Kline’s accent here?

Dad: They’re meant to be either in South Carolina or Virginia.

The friends reconnect while spending the weekend at Harold and Sarah’s property: playing old records, reminiscing about their shared past, and acknowledging their mutual ennui and ambivalent feelings about where they’ve ended up in life. When Michael suggests playing new music in the house, Harold infamously refuses to.

Crockford: See, I hate that shit.

Dad: Why? I mean…

Crockford: It’s so obnoxious! People made great music all the time after 1980, these people are just…yuppies frozen in time.

Dad: I know, I know.

 

Dad: That’s the thing about young boomer culture, it was very intimate, very open.

Crockford: Isn’t that all young people though? You’re learning how to really talk to other people outside of a familial space, letting your guard down. The movie does capture that feeling. 

 

Richard and Chloe both form a quiet counterpoint to the character’s antics and obsession with 1960s culture. The script implies Chloe had an unhappy upbringing and thus doesn’t share the group’s nostalgia—“I don’t like talking about my past as much as you guys do,” she says, while Richard points out that life involves responsibilities and not just “fun.”

 

Crockford: That past line is such a BURN, these people are stuck.

Dad: See, I get what Richard’s saying, square that he is. When you have children, there’s this being, and suddenly you are singularly responsible for them. That is the most important thing, the most important—so what do you do, you know? You need to put them ahead of anything else.

Crockford: I think that’s part of why a lot of my generation didn’t have kids. Well, there was the economic thing too, we literally couldn’t afford it and you could, but I also didn’t wanna make that, uh, deal with the devil, so to speak. I wanted to make my own choices and not compromise everything.

Dad: I also really thought life would be fun, when I was fifteen—I just didn’t expect any hardships. Money issues, working my ass off, divorce—anything like that.

Crockford: …. Well…no, I can’t say I thought life would be fun, but I also had a lot of issues already at fifteen, so no, that just wasn’t on the docket. But then I actively prefer being an adult, so…I didn’t think that as a teenager, no.

 

As the friends party on, sexual tension spreads between characters, especially Karen and Sam. Michael hits on Chloe repeatedly until someone feeds him a quaalude. Meanwhile, despite his war injury, Nick and Chloe develop feelings for one another.

 

Crockford: One thing that’s aged this movie besides the nostalgia—Michael now would be seen as a creep. It’s not unrealistic for the character, but he just keeps trying to get laid and the movie thinks it’s cute.

Dad: I agree, it’s weird.

Crockford: However, Kevin Kline, Harold, is easily the worst character. In denial that he sold out, he keeps covering it up with jokes and stunts. “That cop is one of a hell of a guy”—what’re you talking about?!

 

At the end of The Big Chill, Karen and Sam consummate their attraction but separate, Harold impregnates Meg per Sarah’s request, and Nick decides to stay on in Alex’s old house with Chloe.

 

Crockford: [laughing] Monogamy and marriage are so fucking weird! “Oh, we can’t sleep with anyone else unless we make this one deal where you can knock her up!”

 

Crockford: Alright Dad, final thoughts?

Dad: The movie’s a little too whimsical.

Crockford: Yeah, I’d agree. It’s in love with itself.

Dad: Like there are things in here you’d never say to your buddies, even the ones from twenty years ago.

Crockford: The best lines to me, though, are the cutting ones—Meg Tilly about the past, “The great existential man,” too. That one hurt. I can’t relate to a lot of the characters though financially. Maybe some of the feelings involved. 

Dad: I also just don’t think these generational divides—millennials, boomers, Gen Xers—are real, it’s all stagnation, it’s just a false impression.

Crockford: I think the divide is there—but we’re also all copying each other more than we want to admit. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get a millennial version of The Big Chill sometime soon…oh God. What have I done?

---