The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

While much of the U.S. has been shivering through snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk, not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now, and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.

 In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.

 Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the National  Film Registry, I’ve concluded that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era; sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.

  What do I mean? Well, let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list. They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both, curiously, have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters, while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High Society is a musical throwback to 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love to experience.

 There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989) is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.

 We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how we (or our children) loved The Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

When We Were Young: “Baby, It’s You” and “The Big Chill”

A funny thing about the year 1983: filmmakers who were not so young as they used to be were now looking back on their coming-of-age years, the tender and turbulent Sixties. John Sayles,  recently graduated from making horror flicks for Roger Corman, shot in 1983 his first studio movie, a coming-of-age romantic comedy called Baby, It’s You. Based on a memoir of sorts by Hollywood honcho Amy Robinson, it begins in 1966 in true Sayles territory: Trenton, New Jersey. Jill Rosen (an adorable Rosanna Arquette) is a smart and sassy high school senior who gets good grades and nabs the lead in the school play. Into her life comes Sheik (Vincent Spano), an Italian kid from the other side of the tracks who can’t exactly be called a greaser because he idolizes Frank Sinatra and dresses like a suave man about town. Opposites attract, but though Jill tempts fate by secretly dating this high school drop-out, she manages to move on when she gains admission to her dream school, the tony Sarah Lawrence.

Cut to the following year: Jill has traded in her short skirts and knee socks for hippie garb, discovered pot and the pill, and otherwise explored life beyond the purview of her solidly upper-middle-class parents. On a spring-break trip to Miami she rediscovers Sheik, now dreaming of a showbiz future but basically washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. The attraction is still there, though in other ways she’s evolved. We suspect there’s no future for their relationship, but a sweet ending (one that makes use of Sheik’s favorite song, “Strangers in the Night”) shows how much they continue to mean to one another, come what may.

It's an appealing film, though hardly a deep one, with its nostalgia element heightened by a soundtrack crammed with oldies like “Wooly Bully.” (I can’t resist mentioning that it was The Graduate that in 1967  began the trend of using pop music to establish the mood of an era.) 

After he left the Roger Corman fold, Sayles’ very first film was Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), a small but influential indie about a reunion of Sixties activists, all just turning thirty, a decade or so after their graduation from college. This low-budget gem (which Sayles himself described to me as using the low-budget Corman trick of making do with what you have on hand) was critically acclaimed for capturing the spirit of an era. It seemed to kick off a host of reunion movies, the most potent of which was Lawrence Kasdan’s hugely popular The Big Chill. Like Baby, It’s You, this film looks back on the politics and culture of the Sixties, but from the perspective of campus friends who are now older, but not necessarily wiser, than they were when they linked up at the University of Michigan. Within the framework of a weekend spent in a large house following the suicide of a close friend, The Big Chill examines successes, dreams, and particularly regrets, in a way that is sometimes poignant and sometimes funny. 

The cast of The Big Chill is part of its strength. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, coming off the huge success of his 1981 thriller Body Heat, had access to some of Hollywood’s brightest young talents. Among the film’s stars are William Hurt (who’d scored in Body Heat), Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close, in only her second film. The DVD version I watched includes a years-later interview with cast and crew, highlighting how the ensemble cast, isolated in a South Carolina town, found ways to strengthen their sense of longstanding camaraderie.  

 

The Making (and Mocking) of a President: "Dave"

 In this country, we’re fast approaching the every-four-years Silly Season, when candidates go to insane extremes to convince voters not to support their opponents. (Given the nature of the 2024 U.S. presidential candidates and their proxies, insanity is truly the name of the game.) Last evening, I decided to turn away from political realities by watching a 1993 film that finds great humor and heart in a  presidential what-if.

 In Dave, which came out in the year of Schindler’s List, Kevin Kline plays U.S. President Bill Mitchell,  a cold-hearted man with an eye for pretty young bed-warmers. It bothers him not one whit that his behavior has permanently estranged the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver), who only pretends to be part of a happy presidential couple. But his misbehavior catches up with him when, in bed with a cute member of his staff, he suffers a severe stroke. His cagey chief of staff (the always-slightly-reptilian Frank Langella) has no wish to undermine his own power by handing the reins of government over to the squeaky-clean vice-president (Ben Kingsley, of all people).l His solution is to elevate a convenient look-alike (also, of course, played by Kevin Kline) into the presidency. Kline’s Dave, who runs a Georgetown temp agency, is naturally at first awed by the honor of pretending to be President Mitchell. He’s naïve about the personalities of the powers that be, and overwhelmed by the thrill of actually occupying the presidential suite in the White House. (When he lifts up a phone receiver to make a call from the Oval Office, he feels the need to ask if he needs to dial 9 first.)

 But Dave, for all his aw-shucks manner, is not exactly a fool. He believes in his country’s mission, sees true honor in helping the genuinely needy, and quickly discovers that as President Mitchell he’s positioned to do an end-run around his malevolent chief of staff. There comes a time, though, when the situation of a missing, ailing  president has to be permanently resolved. And Dave’s inventive solution, which I’m sure takes most viewers completely by surprise, allows for a happy ending that’s at least semi-credible, given all that’s gone before.

 It's well known that comedies, even excellent ones, are generally overlooked when Oscars are handed out. The year of Schindler’s List also produced a number of other seriously great films, like The Remains of the Day, The Age of Innocence, and Philadelphia, the AIDS-related drama for which Tom Hanks won his first Oscar.  Dave was nominated for exactly one Academy Award, a well-deserved nod to Gary Ross for his original screenplay, which beautifully sets up all the craziness to come. (As a longtime teacher of screenwriting. I salute him.) The screenwriting Oscar, though, went to Jane Campion, for her extraordinarily inventive work on The Piano. (Other losers in that category were Ron Nyswaner for writing Philadelphia and Nora Ephron—among others—for scripting a romcom classic, Sleepless in Seattle.)

 Politics American-style is a funny business. The year of Dave’s release into theatres was also the year that William Jefferson Clinton entered the White House. When the threat of a presidential impeachment arose in Dave, audiences of the time were well aware that a U.S. president had never been impeached since Andrew Johson in 1868. That was to change in 1998 following the notorious Monica Lewinsky affair, and of course we all know which president was impeached twice during his single term in office.

 What’s going on our country today is no laughing matter. But I’m grateful that Dave finds some humor in unthinkable news from Washington.