The Big Chill

Lawrence Kasdan had written The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark and directed Body Heat when he made this, and The Big Chill is what he did with the credit those bought him: eight people in a house for a weekend after a funeral. The friends met at university in Michigan in the sixties and marched and meant it. Fifteen years on they sell running shoes, star in a television cop show and write for a celebrity magazine, and the one who never settled has cut his wrists. Kasdan and his co-writer Barbara Benedek want to know what became of the promises. They ask the question well and never make anyone answer it.

The cast is the pleasure. Kevin Kline’s Harold is the host who has made the most money and feels least bad about it, all easy hospitality with something tighter underneath. Glenn Close gives Sarah, his wife, the film’s one moment of raw grief, alone in the shower on the morning of the funeral, and plays it with her back to us. Jeff Goldblum’s Michael gets the best lines and knows it. William Hurt’s Nick, arriving in a Porsche with a case of pills, is the one performance that suggests real damage; Hurt keeps his voice so flat that when he raises it everyone else stops talking. Mary Kay Place, JoBeth Williams and Tom Berenger fill the table without a weak link, and Meg Tilly, as the dead man’s young girlfriend Chloe, is the only person in the house who was not at the university and does not pretend to miss it.

Ida Random’s house is big, wooden and full of books nobody is reading, and John Bailey lights it amber so it seems permanently at the end of a long dinner. He keeps the camera at table height and lets the group fill the frame, and the film is best whenever six of them are talking at once. Carol Littleton’s opening, cutting between each friend dressing for the funeral and a pair of hands dressing the corpse, to Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, shows the method in four minutes: death, beautifully soundtracked. Bill Conti is credited with the score and we cannot recall a note of it, because the Motown does the work.

After dinner Harold puts on the Temptations’ ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ and the whole party washes up dancing, plates passing hand to hand, Kline doing something unforgivable with his hips. We grinned all the way through it and then felt faintly ashamed, because ten minutes earlier we had been at a graveside and the film had made grief go away with a record. It is a lovely trick. It is also the only one the film has, and it plays it whenever a conversation gets near anything painful.

What it will not do is hurt anybody. Alex, the dead friend, is never seen alive and barely described, so the suicide at the centre of the film is a blank onto which the survivors project whatever regret suits them. Nobody’s compromise is examined for longer than a wisecrack. Michael’s video interview with Nick, in which Nick ends up questioning himself, is the one scene that looks at a wrecked life and stays there, and it lasts about three minutes. An arrangement made on the last night, which we will not describe, treats a real loneliness as something a good friend can fix with a favour, and we did not believe it for a moment. Don Galloway’s Richard, the husband who was not at Michigan and says so at dinner, is the one person who tells them the sixties are over, and the film changes the subject.

John Sayles had made the same weekend three years earlier as Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), on almost no money and with far more patience for letting his people be dull, petty and wrong. Kasdan’s version is better acted and better dressed; April Ferry puts enough money on everyone’s back that you can read the bank balances before anyone speaks. But Body Heat was willing to leave its people worse off than it found them. This one sends everyone home slightly improved.

It runs 105 minutes and carries a 15, and it is an easy evening in good company, which is all it wants to be. Watch it for the cast, the records and Hurt. Then, if you want to see the same weekend go badly, find the Sayles.