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.

 

Children of a Lesser God”: The Deaf Speak Out

CODA, a small film about a deaf family in small-town Massachusetts, surprised the experts by winning Best Picture at this year’s Oscar ceremony. But CODA (the title stands for “Child of Deaf Adults”) is hardly the first award-winning American film that has featured non-hearing characters.

 Johnny Belinda was a schmaltzy melodrama that created quite a stir in 1948 for its then-bold depiction of rape and its consequences. It was nominated for a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture, and star Jane Wyman took home a golden statuette for her portrayal of what was then called a “deaf-mute.” It would not be the last time a hearing actress was lauded for portraying someone unable to hear. The film version of William Gibson’s stage hit, The Miracle Worker, dramatizing the early life of Helen Keller, was one of 1962’s greatest hits. It garnered two Oscars. One was for Anne Bancroft as Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan. The second, in the “supporting” category, was for young Patty Duke (barely 16), who vividly portrayed Keller as a savage young girl unable to see or hear until the great breakthrough moment when she discovers that water “has a name.”  Duke, who had also starred in the stage production of Gibson’s play, was of course perfectly capable of seeing and hearing. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine someone contending with the physical and mental rigors of this role, especially on a  typical eight-performances-a-week Broadway schedule, without being able to communicate easily with her director and her fellow thespians. A blind actress playing young Helen Keller still seems impossible. But a DEAF actress—who knows?

 A change in thinking is afoot. I’m by no means claiming that all members of the deaf community are inherently talented actors. But those fluent in American Sign Language are grounded in what we might call acting techniques. This language is not conveyed simply through spelling with the fingers. Emphatic gestures and easily-read facial expressions are part of the whole communication system employed by the deaf.

 Children of a Lesser God, which ran on Broadway from 1980 to 1982 after being launched at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum, is a play by Mark Medoff that directly tackles the gap between the deaf and the hearing community. The play won three Tony Awards, for Best Play, for Best Actor (John Rubenstein) and for Best Actress (Phyllis Frelich). In many ways it is Frelich’s own story, reflecting her struggles as a deaf woman to reconcile with an environment that demands that she learn, however awkwardly, to voice words in English. What gives the play power is that it’s an unconventional love story, in which a hearing man who teaches deaf youngsters to speak falls for a vibrant but angry young woman who refuses to set aside her well-honed ASL skills in order to join the wider world. 

 When the play was acquired by Hollywood, playwright Medoff was still involved, but the context of the story changed, removing a strand involving a lawsuit that would have required deaf children to be instructed solely by deaf teachers. Yet the central issue remained: that of deaf individuals fearing they’ll lose their unique culture if required to communicate in ways that are not natural to them. The 1986 film was nominated for Best Picture and 5 other honors. Male lead William Hurt, whose recent death I mourn, makes a sympathetic leading man, both sensitive enough and quirky enough to be believable in a challenging role. But his opposite number, Marlee Matlin made history as the first deaf performer to win an Oscar.  Now, thanks to CODA’s Troy Kotsur, she’s not alone.