Goodbye, Peter Pan

The Big Chill; Directed by Lawrence Kasdan

It is unique in that it has something for virtually everyone to hate. Consider the characters, all eight. They are the types of people that our parents warned us about in the late 60’s and early 70’s: not the drug pushers who lurked behind bushes, as they had been identified in the field guides drilled into us during primary and secondary school along with warnings about blasting caps on construction sites (“DON’T TOUCH”), but the college “radicals,” those boys and girls with hearts so big and minds so empty. But the time is not 1969, it’s 1983, and the place is not Ann Arbor, it’s a demi-plantation in South Carolina. And yes, the University of Michigan graduates have all grown up: they all pack blow-dryers in their luggage. And they have all (well, almost all) sold out. Two points are in order about the characters. First of all, if you’re writing a screenplay about a reunion of people who went to the U. of M. in the late 60’s, chances are you’ll use ex-radicals, not ex-MBA candidates. The Big Chill isn’t exactly scintillating, but a film about the young blood in the Chamber of Commerce would be the deep freeze, unless one of them happened to be a murderer or something. While it’s fairly evident that Kasdan, who was part of the Ann Arbor milieu, has certain sympathies for those people, he is also adequately distanced so that he can poke gentle fun at them: one man starts a chain of jogging shoe stores that’s called, borrowing a compound adjective once ap­ plied to American “imperialists,” “Running Dog” shoe stores. Secondly, the former radicalism of the characters isn’t of paramount importance; they all could have been members of the Y.A.F. Anyone in any time who has attended a reunion undoubtedly feels, for at least a moment, the difference between youthful possibility and adult reality, the feeling that what one does for a living — even if one has “made it” in professional and economic terms — doesn’t quite have the sparkle of a dream. One of the characters used to write for The Michigan Daily; now he jets hither and yon to interview celebrities and newsmakers, has the sort of job that young people can imagine only with awe: he is a writer for People magazine. Something is lost in the translation from the dream to the reality.

 

That translation is at the center of the film. The characters are brought together, almost in the manner of a well-made play, under somewhat forced circumstances. One of their former classmates, a man who showed promise in the field of physics but who dropped  out  in  order to “find himself,” and who ended up cut­ ting his wrists in a bathtub, is the causal factor. No one really knows why he did it; reality was undoubtedly unappealing to him. What the characters never seem to recognize is that the world that they inhabit is one that they didn’t inherit but one that they helped build. For example, one woman, who, like the others, is in her mid-thirties, initially decided that she would pursue her career as a lawyer by being a big-city public defender. It sounds right to a young idealist. Once she starts doing it, she realizes that it means that she has to be on the side of those whom she quite correctly identifies as being “scum.” She turns to real-estate law. Part of the life-style that she once lived and so promulgated included the notions of “free love” and “doing one’s thing.” She wants to have a baby; in her ears, the biological clock is not going tick-tick-tick, but Boom!-Boom!-Boom! The obvious difficulty is that she isn’t married. A key reason for this is because the much-heralded sexual revolution has resulted in the mass production of men who have self-consuming ideas like wanting a commitment but not involvement. Another large portion, which can be readily spotted in any singles’ bar in the country, while clean, snappily at­ tired, and owners of 280-Z’s and Firebirds, are not unlike — or at least have the appeal — of the clients in a public defender’s office. The woman finds a solution to her baby-making, but she never seems to recognize the  role she played in producing the problem.

The fact that Kasdan uses a tender prod and that his characters see through a glass partially are ultimately his undoing, for they show that he pulls back from making judgments, he fails to honestly assess the situation. Part of it might be that Kasdan is still too close to the people and to the times. He certainly knows something about the real world, but he doesn’t want to bare his dreams to close scrutiny. Until he is able to do that, his creations will, though perhaps having moments of depth, be characterized by shallowness, even if they are over the heads of others who are both making and watching films.

Although The Big Chill is a mass release, it is really a cult film, given the fact that there are references made or alluded to that must be caught and understood. There is a great deal of cliché, some of which, properly interpreted, acts like a message in shorthand. The most obvious instance of this is the soundtrack, which is keyed to the events, not the mindless pounding of a Flashdance. There’s a great deal of Motown (Smokey smoothly singing his songs, not Linda Ronstadt doing a bastardized cover), The Young Rascals, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, Procol Harum. What is missing includes any of the so-called psychedelic music (e.g., no “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) and, most tellingly, any revolutionary music: not one instance of Grace Slick shouting “Up against the wall,” not a bit of Country Joe and the Fish, not even anything by Ann Arbor’s houseband of the period in question, the MC-5. Much of the missing music was more popular with those who excoriated it than with those who were supposedly smashing the state while listening to it. Aha! But there is a Rolling Stones tune, and it’s even said to be the dearly departed’s favorite song Here Kasdan borders on the bathetic — ‘but only if certain aspects of the tune are identified. The song is ”You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a fitting piece for a funeral in that the original version opens with a plaintive French horn solo. The song is unusual among the works of Messrs. Jagger and Richards since in it they seem to recognize that they are two self-centered poseurs. One of the lines in the song is most telling about the life and times of the participants in The Big Chill “I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse, singing ‘We’re going to vent our frustrations — if we don’t, we’re gonna blow a 50-amp fuse!”‘ Even then, some of the so-called militants recognized that it was a combi­ nation of striking poses and show-biz. There is one more thing that works in Kasdan’s favor with regard to its application to the suicide: the song is included on an album titled Let It Bleed

One of the differences between The Big Chill and something written by, say, Neil Simon, is that the characters don’t simply feel, but they think about feeling. While they regularly fail into the La Brea tar pits of banality, the effort is laudable. One of the few American filmmakers who acknowledges the existence of what can be broadly called philosophy is Woody Allen, and he makes reference to it only to laugh at it. Should Kasdan continue in this direction and not fall back into the simplicity of his Continental Divide, by the time his graduates are ready for their 20-year reunion, he may have something.    cc

 

Illumination for Dimwits

Under Fire; Directed by Roger Spottiswoode; Written by Ron Shelton and Clayton Frohman; Orion.

In contemporary films dealing with fighting, soldiers are out and journalists are in. While this may be a hangover from Vietnam and Watergate, it is more likely just evidence that many moviegoers have overinflated self-images. That is, soldiers are conventionally not  intellectuals ( otherwise they would be commanders, and even they are suspect today), and as viewers nowadays like to  think themselves to  be very bright, they prefer to identify with  those  who seem to use their minds for a living But the journalist- heroes in Under Fire, who treat war like reporters covering the international soccer circuit (i.e., this week Africa, next week Latin America), are less cognizant of what is going on around them — both personally and socially — than are those whom they are supposed to enlighten. For example, after a two-minute poolside chat over cocktails, a newsmagazine correspondent and his photojournalist sidekick know all that the need to discern, for their purposes, about the situation in Nicaragua in 1979: the rebels are good; Somoza and the American government are bad, skip the Q.E.D. —this is the age of immediate enlightenment. Roger Spottiswoode, former film editor for the unsubtle Sam Peckinpah, knows that messages are best delivered to a mass audience through the broadest of gestures. He recognizes that the typical film goer, intellectual pretentions notwithstanding, doesn’t want to get mixed up in matters of politics and economics. So he sets up the film, a sort of illegitimate child of Costa-Gavras’s bastard Missing, as if it is a true rendering by using documentary-style subtitles, showing a real­ but-fabricated cover of Time, using topical references ( e.g., one journalist to another: “Gee, I haven’t seen you since Three Mile Island!”), and by shooting it on a very convincing set in Mexico. He populates the set with people who will evoke love or hate — there’s no in-between. The leads are all out of some Filmmakers Guide to Propaganda for the Public, 1983 Edition. Foremost, there’s the macho-beefcake photojournalist (blond hair, simian features) who falls for a woman reporter whose only apparent characteristics are those which would be the result of living with the Jane Fonda Workout Book. Unfortunately for the twosome — for a while, anyway — the woman happens to be married to a man who looks like Walter Cronkite, acts like Dan Rather, and is the photojournalist’s mentor and meal ticket. Hanky-panky, as if it might offend viewers whereas the distortions of the Nicaraguan revolution won’t, is commenced only after the unhappily marrieds separate, and the husband is eventually killed off (by Somoza’s troops, of course) for good measure. There are two bad guys, one a holdover from World War II movies and the other of recent vintage. The former is straight out of Vichy: a smooth-talking, reptilian Frenchman who happens to be somehow involved with the C.I.A. and who is, therefore, a creep who receives his just deserts in the form of a bullet in the head. The latter is an all-American, brush­ cut-topped man who is dastardly not because he is a soldier of fortune, but because he fights against the rebels.

Once these players are put into their positions, Spottiswoode has to show the viewer why the revolutionaries are good. This he does through the use of a single individualized rebel character (there’s no need to confuse things, it seems), a young man named Pedro. This benign boy wears Nikes on his feet and pulls a Baltimore Orioles cap on his head before he whips a curve ball that happens to be a grenade into a bell tower held by government soldiers. As any American male viewer knows, a kid with an arm like that can’t be all bad. While there is still joy in Mudville, the shutterbug, his sweetheart, and the would-be Cy Young Award winner swagger away from the rubble. Pedro remarks, “I like the Sandinistas — and I like the Baltimore Orioles.” Before the viewer can figure out that the nicest thing that can be said about the forced correspondence between the two organizations is that it is diabolical, dear Pedro is shot — by the vicious American mercenary. From that point on, grosser emotions are the keynote; the American lovers hop into bed with the revolutionaries.

Since the audience is by this time, presumably, fully on the side of the protagonists, who are on a constant sweaty run away from the soldiers who would like to shoot them, and with good reason, the beef and cheese confections can stoop to any levels and pervert truths in any manner for the Sandinistas, who come off like a scrubby Little League team taking on (inept) pros. All aspects of the film support this stance. For example, a bus filled with explosives (a favorite deadly tool of terrorists) destroys a tank and Jerry Goldsmith’s upbeat music booms out as if the audience is to leap up and perform a variation on the rumba. Finally, the state is smashed, and there’s real dancing in the streets of Managua, sort of like there was in the streets of Baltimore last October.  The journalist heroes arrive on the scene to buy souvenirs — rebel flags, or pennants — then drive off in a taxi to wreak their romantic havoc in another part of the world about which they are equally ignorant. The audience leaves the theater, thinking itself entertained and enlightened about current events and foreign policy. But the images they have seen, which are free of Cuban or Soviet “advisers” (yet there is a tableaux straight out of Che!), are about as true to life as are the mirrors at a carnival sideshow. (SM)    cc