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Count me in as one of the detractors of this film. As one of the many who this as Exhibit A of what can, and does, make the Baby Boomer generation so goddamn insufferable whenever they go off on their “You had to be there, man” nostalgia riffs. The film views these characters with sympathy, but I couldn’t muster up much for them.
This group of people can’t seem to look beyond their navels. If they do, it’s only to then look towards the past with rose-tinted glasses, believing that the time that they came up was somehow the pinnacle of achievement. It frequently feels like self-indulgence of a bunch of wealthy white people unable to see their mass privilege. To be perfectly blunt about it, here’s a group of seven supremely glib people who treat the eighth, the audience surrogate, as a child when she’s really just a slightly younger member of their generation.
Shame to, as the ensemble on this thing is stacked with powerhouse acting titans. Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, JoBeth Williams, Meg Tilly, and Mary Kay Place give the script better life than it deserves. They deliver their series of unnecessarily clever one-liners with consummate skill. Try as they might though, they can’t overcome how easily the script leans on humor in place of real emotion and feeling.
If all of this nostalgia and introspection had been given more true emotional life, I probably wouldn’t have been so blasé on the whole enterprise. It scored to a phenomenal soundtrack, at times employed with cringe-inducing sequences, and stacked with a fabulous ensemble, so The Big Chill is never without its merits. It’s just so damn manipulative. Leaning on hard on these well-to-do white folks using the music of the Civil Rights era as their soundtrack for a weekend getaway is questionable if I’m being generous, and offensive if I’m being honest. And have I mentioned how much I dislike the pithy dialog? But that damn cast, though. The Big Chill is a movie that has me slightly split, cause where it’s good it soars, but where it’s bad, it’s smugly self-congratulatory.
