1983's The Big Chill is not a great movie. It's a comedy about serious issues that is neither particularly funny nor dramatic. But it is an interesting film, and interesting in a way that ensures it would never be made in the 2014 film climate.
This is a meandering, plotless film, about nothing more than the characters hanging out. We do still get these movies, notably in the Joe Swanberg-led mumblecore movement, but these are mainly VOD curiosities, attracting excellent actors, but not the mainstream big names who serve as a touchstone for all of us.
The Big Chill featured many of the biggest name comic and dramatic actors of the time, with Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, and Tom Berenger to name only the biggest stars of the film. Each of them, in 1983, could probably have anchored a major movie by themselves, so having them all together was a pretty big deal. Of course, big names do work together nowadays, but almost always under the pretext of a big summer tentpole action film, rather than a depiction of quarter life crises.
This is the kind of theme that gets treated in prestige cable TV now, but there's something to be said for doing it in a movie, where you can just spend two hours intensely getting to know some characters who are going through basic human things, rather than committing all of the time a TV show requires. Also, TV tends to by necessity be more informational and plot-heavy, so the real meandering nature of a movie like The Big Chill would probably be sacrificed.
In today's quarter life crisis dramadies on TV, most notably HBO's Girls, we get to know characters over dozens of hours of programming, and they change, grow, make mistakes, and have triumphs. In films like The Big Chill, we are more just dropped in on their already in-progress lives, and have to figure out who they are on the fly. That seems like a more accurate representation of life, rather than parceling out information about characters piecemeal. Tone, atmosphere, and mood are more firmly established in a film that presents its characters in situ, rather than one that develops. We are looking in on some self-contained ecosystem, rather than being shown how this ecosystem develops. Voyeurism versus conspiratoriality--I don't necessarily want to be a co-conspirator with my entertainment.
Judd Apatow, of course, has made countless such quarter or third life dramadies over the past decade--but characters in his film are never too far from going for the big joke. It seems to be considered unsafe for a studio to release a movie without characters who are at least as funny as amateur stand up comedians. But this always puts me at something of a remove--why are these people straining so hard to be funny? Why can't they just be people? People aren't usually that funny, and that is okay.
There are jokes in The Big Chill, but not nearly as many as the typical Apatow production, and not nearly as lewd. There was something nice about a time when adults didn't share thesis-length thoughts and barbs on topics like cumming, shitting, and anal bleeding.
I suppose Wes Anderson does quarter life crisis films on occasion, The Royal Tenenbaums being the most notable one--but there's always a thick, gauzy layer of self-conscious style. In The Big Chill the only style is the lack of style--we are simply shown human beings. David O. Russell is big on showing real people too, but there's always a highly important locale, occupation, or other kind of theme that frames the characters in an important way. Lawrence Kasdan was certainly a big name director in his day, but The Big Chill is anything but a vehicle for his own aesthetic.
The stars of the film allow their natural movie star charisma to propel things, but they aren't dialing back or dialing up. They are just being themselves, and they are inherently interesting enough to make that mean something. The contemporary equivalent would be something like letting Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, and Bradley Cooper just exist as people, without an endless supply of one-liners, without the weight of a genre or tight plot or period-piece informing everything.
The Big Chill was just a low-stakes movie with some of our biggest stars hanging out. Today, our most watchable actors simply playing human beings without being tied to genre, plot, period, or gimmick is a far more ridiculous proposition than showing an alien invasion, or world-ending natural disaster, or space opera.
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