The Big Chill

Have you ever watched a TV show or movie that your parents used to swear was great, but when you watched it, it seemed...quaint?  It happens with me all the time, partially because I'm a little snotty, and partially because my dad still laughs out loud at Barney Fife.  It's not a bad thing, but it just goes to show how certain things age differently than others.  It also serves as an example to generational gaps.  I understand that; I still look back fondly at Homer Simpson falling down Springfield Gorge, but objectively, that Simpsons episode is pretty old and not very funny.  It just holds nostalgic value for me that my children will never understand.

Keep that in mind as I take a look at The Big Chill.

Alex (an uncredited --- because they left his face on the cutting room floor --- Kevin Costner) commits suicide.  His college buddies from the '60s show up for his funeral and get to catching up.  They include a married couple, Harold (Kevin Kline) and Sarah (Glenn Close); a successful Magnum, PI-style television actor, Sam (Tom Berenger); an unhappy public defender, Meg (Mary Kay Place); a professional drug-dealing Vietnam veteran and former radio shrink, Nick (William Hurt); a "journalist" for People magazine, Michael (Jeff Goldblum); and a housewife that regrets marrying a "safe" husband, Karen (JoBeth Williams).  They are joined by Alex's much, much younger (and very flexible) girlfriend/amateur space cadet, Chloe (Meg Tilly).  This group (minus Chloe) went to a Division I college and more than half of them got rich.

And yet, none of them are truly happy.  Sadly, the lovely Motown soundtrack does not include a track of the smallest violin in the world playing a sad song, just for them.  Sarah once had an affair with Alex, and her relationship with Harold never had the same level of trust again; this is compounded by their decision to help financially support Alex in the months preceding his suicide.  Sam feels cheapened by his lame acting gig and wants, more than anything else, to fulfill his long desire to be with Karen.  Karen feels trapped by her boring husband and kids.  Michael is unfulfilled, writing journalistic tripe for a magazine you read in the bathroom or at the doctor's office.  Meg wants a baby, but has no suitors and her biological clock is ticking away.  Nick felt like a fraud as a radio host and balances that with his lack of self worth as a drug dealer.  Oh, and he apparently has erectile dysfunction as a side effect of going to Vietnam.  Or he has a war wound in his crotch.  Or he has a terrible STD from Vietnam.  Whatever.  The big guy has a problem with his little guy.  Chloe is just bizarre and seems attracted by damaged men.  By the time the weekend ends, all of these problems are addressed and (more or less) solved.

I think my favorite thing about this movie is the script.  It is clever and witty, and it leaves out a lot.  That might sound like a drawback, but there is a lot of great dialogue, and real conversations do not spell everything out for onlookers.  There are dozens of funny one-liners, but the script is deeper than that, forcing the viewer to come to their own conclusions about how each character feels about the rest.  As the least sexually-successful member of the group, Michael has a lot of great lines that work, regardless of context, and Jeff Goldblum delivers these lines with panache.  There is a lot of sarcasm in the script, and everyone gets a turn eventually, but I think Goldblum's lines make him the most memorable supporting character.

The acting and direction (by Lawrence Kasdan) are both pretty good, too.  Kevin Kline and William Hurt are usually pretty dependable, and they both are given some solid dialogue, so it's a win-win with them.  Jeff Goldblum is sarcastic, witty, and nobody has sex with him, which is probably as it should be.  Meg Tilly was surprisingly wonderful as the spacey young member of the group; she is alternately distant and intimate, random and on-the-nose, throughout her performance, and I imagine that is hard to pull off.  The rest of the cast (Bernenger, Place, and Williams) are decent, but nothing special.  There was one character that I outright disliked.  Glenn Close's character struck me as particularly disturbing and unrealistic.  I know Close can act, but her emotions in this movie are so unpredictable and inconsistent that I just can't deal with her.

It's not all her fault, though.  The plot for this movie is absolutely ludicrous.  I know coming-of-age stories with ensemble casts usually have a suspicious number of characters come to important conclusions by the end of the film, but this is ridiculous.  Everyone in the principal cast has a life-changing weekend?  What is this, The Breakfast Club?  I don't appreciate some of the plot devices, either.  Why would anyone sit in front of a video camera and be bluntly honest and emotional if they were planning on watching the video in front of their friends?  That is beyond awkward.  I think my biggest problem with the plot deals with Glenn Close's character.  ***SPOILER ALERT*** So Meg wants a kid, but can't find a daddy.  She asks around, and Sam won't do it, Nick can't do it, and she doesn't want Michael, so Sarah suggests her husband?  I'm sorry, but that makes no sense to me.  One the one hand, I would feel uncomfortable (at best) if Glenn Close encouraged me to cheat on her.  She is Ms. Fatal Attractions, you know.  On the other hand, where do you go after that?  How does sympathy sleeping with a friend not attract jealousy and discontent within a marriage?  It's one thing to be married to a crazy woman, but to have her allow you to cheat...well, it may seem like a blessing, but I see a death-by-butcher-knife in your future, my friend.  

If this was almost any other movie, I would give it a few stars for the clever dialogue and dock it points for the ridiculous story and predictable plot.  As it happens, though, my parents were pretty big fans of this film when I was growing up and, while the film doesn't carry as much weight for me as it did them, my early exposure left a soft spot in my heart for it.  Despite the clumsiness of the dance scenes, the implausibility of most of the romances, and almost everything relating to William Hurt's character, I am going to give this movie the benefit of the doubt.  That said, I cannot forgive the egomaniacal self-centeredness of the Baby Boomers, no matter how handsomely it is disguised.  As such, I give this tribute to rich people schtupping each other...

Youth In Revolt

All comedic actors have an image problem at some point in their careers.  Yes, it's great that Jim Carrey can talk out of his butt, or that Adam Sandler can start a sentence very quietly and then talk real loud, but eventually, they got tired of the same shtick and branched out into more varied roles.  This usually means a dramatic role that forces audiences to look at the actor in a new light, but these new roles are usually less impressive than their earlier silly stuff.  Michael Cera, who has managed to play the same character in several comedies over the past three or four years, takes a different approach to reinventing his image in Youth in Revolt.

Cera plays the lead role of Nick Twisp, a smart, introverted sixteen year old that longs to have a woman to give him a reason to desire.  He spends his time listening to Frank Sinatra vinyl and reading classic prose, trying to imagine a plausible way to lose his virginity.  It doesn't help that his family essentially rubs their sex lives in his face.  His mother (Jean Smart) is unapologetic about her low dating standards and his father (Steve Buscemi) is dating a buxom twenty-five year old (Ari Graynor).  With nothing better to do, Nick follows his mother and her boyfriend on a short vacation to a trailer park.  There, Nick meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a pretty girl his age that is interested in literature and vinyl, too, although with a distinct preference for all things French.  Since she lives in a trailer park, there's not much to do but see how the new kid is, and they begin to spend time together.  Sheeni enjoys flirting with Nick and teasing him about his virginity, while Nick is simply amazed that an attractive girl would ever speak to him, much less kiss him.  Sheeni dreams of living in France and likes the idea of "bad boys."  Nick is obviously not bad.  Still, he falls in love with her, does a few silly things and temporarily wins her affection.  Unfortunately, Nick's time in the trailer park is limited.  Nick professes his love to Sheeni and comes up with a plan for them to be together, permanently.  Sheeni's part is to find a job for Nick's unemployed father near the trailer park.  All Nick has to do is be a bad enough son for his mother to send him to live with his father.  Sheeni has her doubts about this plan, but Nick swears he can do it, so she tells him to be "very, very bad."  Enter Francois Dillinger, the agressive, selfish, rude, and (above all else) French alter-ego for Nick.  With the help of Francois, Nick gets to be very bad indeed.  Of course, being bad has its consequences, and earning love is not necessarily one of them.

Before I mention anything else, I have to say that I find Michael Cera in the Francois persona an absolutely hilarious concept.  Of course Michael Cera's bad side looks just like him, only with a wispy mustache and a part in his hair.  I loved that Nick and Francois shared the screen together, taking turns observing and being in control.  It's like the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, where Tom would have a mini-devil pop up on his shoulder and give him advice.  Actually, it's better because Francois smokes cigarettes and wears vaguely European clothing (white pants and no socks?).  I even liked how Francois held his cigarettes; it always looked cool, but was pretty unrealistic (is he holding it between his pinkie and ring finger?).  Most of Francois' manners and mannerisms feel completely fabricated, which is perfect for a character that was created by a well-read nerd that desperately wants to be cool.  You would think that Nick would be a less funny version of Cera's typical neurotic role, if only to give Francois room to work, but the Nick character also works well.  As far as I'm concerned, the Michael Cera content in this movie was great.

The rest of the movie works less well.  One of the main problems I have is with the language.  No, it's not particularly vulgar (although it's by no means a family comedy).  The dialogue for most of the cast is just not natural, for lack of a better description.  It sounds like the dialogue belongs in a volume of flowery prose, which I'm sure is the creative team's intent.  Unfortunately, this comes off as clunky; the script is pretty clever and is full of references that I cannot speak to (I'm not being egotistical, but that's hard to do in American cinema), but a lot of it feels lost in translation.  I get the impression that the book (which I haven't read) plays up Nick's love of literature and letters more than a film adaptation ever could, and it's too bad.  I think this would have worked better if the story was clearly being narrated by Nick throughout, like this movie was his screenplay about his love for Sheeni and he was an unreliable narrator.

The language could have been seen as a bizarre quirk if the pacing had been better.  This is only ninety minutes long, but it feels a lot longer, and I'm not sure why.  One reason could be the glut of secondary characters in this movie.  They are all colorful, but I don't know if they were all necessary to the story.  The pacing could be because the source material from author C.D. Payne was set up as a series of letters, a la Dracula.   I'm inclined to believe, though, that the pacing suffered because director Miguel Arteta did not edit the movie well.  So much of this movie is repetitive, hammering the same ideas over and over; I get it, Michael Cera is a subtle actor to a fault, but I don't need to be told that he's lonely and awkward more than once or twice to believe it.  It's like belaboring the point that Woody Allen is a neurotic Jewish New Yorker.

The rest of the film was fine.  The acting was all good, but most of the actors had only bit parts.  Cera was his typical awkward self, but I happen to really enjoy his awkwardness.  Portia Doubleday did a good job as his foil, but aside from showing a talent for deadpanning lines, it's hard to judge her talents.  It was nice to see Steve Buscemi in an indie movie again, even if it had him in a relationship with a woman far too attractive to be with him.  Still, casting Buscemi as Cera's dad is a good choice.  I liked Zach Galifianakis, and Ray Liotta in their small roles as the boyfriends of Nick's mom.  Fred Willard is always Fred Willard, but he gets some decent material here and that makes all the difference.  Justin Long has a bit part and I actually liked him, which is a first for me.  You might recognize Jonathan B. Wright from his small role in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist; he doesn't get much more screen time here as Nick's largely unseen nemesis, but he could be good if given more to work with.  Adhir Kalyan was an okay choice for Vijay, but there aren't really a lot of Indian actors that can play nerdy right now.  M. Emmet Walsh is clearly too old to have fathered Sheeni, but he's still funny.  I liked Mary Kay Place fine as Sheeni's mom, but I wasn't particularly impressed with Jean Smart as Nick's mom.

Between the overwhelming amount of recognizable actors, the slow pace, and the language barrier, this film's negatives overwhelm the presence of Francois Dillinger.  For a movie with such a clear-cut purpose (be bad to win the girl), the story was surprisingly slow.  Sure, I enjoyed most of the characters, but there was rarely a unique payoff for their scenes.  I wouldn't mind if one of C.D. Payne's other Nick Twisp books was eventually made into a movie, but I would hope that the filmmakers learn from this film and deliver the sharp, quick movie these characters deserve.