![]() ![]() Kasdan attempts to guise this decidedly commercial choice through the proclivities of his characters, but the wager is wafer thin. Unfortunately, Kasdan and Benedek are beholden to nostalgia, churning out characters whose dulled sense of both self and irony is surpassed only by the pandering and indulgent soundtrack, which functions like a mixtape of the most fetishized order. That infatuation largely derives from the film’s corpus of white-bread urbanites, whose engagement with the past is located either through lip-service incarnations of prior selves or favorite music tracks from college, the latter of which haunts the film like a mantra, as if trying to ward off the impending terrors of old age and dead companions. Yet nothing’s as pure in Kasdan’s film as Michael’s disingenuously stated resolution via corporeal conviction, since The Big Chill prides the song, and not the body, as its central object of obsession. We’re never leaving.” The cleansed innocence of the infant body arrives full circle to the stubborn insistence of thirtysomething immortality in Kasdan and Barbara Benedek’s script, which finds a handful of friends reuniting at a “summer house” after a funeral in Beaufort, South Carolina, following a fellow University of Michigan friend’s, named Alex, suicide. The young boy sings Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World,” a song that returns at the film’s end, once Michael (Jeff Goldblum) says, “We took a secret vote. Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill begins in a bathtub, as Harold (Kevin Kline) washes his infant son. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |