Chilled out

State of the Art

by Peter Keough

Fifteen years later, the chill goes on. In 1983 Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill was an unlikely hit, an ensemble piece about compromised ex-hippies getting together for a friend's funeral, there to complain about lost ideals, mortality, the state of popular music, and the way everybody is complaining.

Starring then-rising actors like William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, and Mary Kay Place, the film owed not a little of its success to John Sayles's funkier prototype The Return of the Secaucus Seven, to a non-stop soundtrack of heavily nostalgic Motown, and to a generation's immersion in self-reflection -- to, the uncharitable might say, narcissism and self-pity. It raked in $30 million during its first year of release, and its title became a cultural buzzword. Now it's being re-released. Has this parable about aging youth aged well itself?

Place -- whose Meg, a disillusioned corporate lawyer desperate to get pregnant, takes advantage of the impromptu get-together to seek out a likely sperm donor -- believes the film has a perennial appeal. "I think there are two things about the movie that have made people respond in the first place, and this is sort of based on people stopping me in the street to this day and talking about it. The first thing is the sense of community that it invites -- people seem to have had the group of friends, in college, or at some point, that they feel are like the group of friends in The Big Chill. I think for many people, college is the first time when they're sort of out of their own family unit and they create another kind of a family with peers -- with friends. That's sort of universal; I think we all kind of yearn for community.

"And then, number two, I think we've all experienced an idealistic dream about something, whether it's writing a novel or a relationship or what parenthood would be like, and the reality of it is a very different story. And so the acknowledgment of the difference between the fantasy dream and the reality is a big chill!"

For Place, a chill set in shortly after making the movie. "I had been working really hard the previous 12 years. And so I sort of took my foot off the gas pedal. I was ready for a still and quiet phase in my life. I was fried to a crispy little critter by the time that movie came out. And so I went into the least active portion of my career, because I needed to refill the well. In a big way. I was just spent."

Place has recently been drawing from the well again, with fine performances in Citizen Ruth, Manny & Lo, Pecker, and the upcoming Being John Malkovich. Meanwhile, her fellow cast members, like their fictional counterparts, have been pursuing their own ambitions and drifting apart.

"Immediately afterward we were all getting together all the time, but as, you know, our lives -- we all live on different coasts -- and families, and just the way, you know, things go, we're just not -- I guess Kevin [Kline] is the one that I see most consistently."

The father of Meg's child?

"Right," Place says, laughing. "It was a grand gesture, but I don't know that it really took."

The Big Chill opens this Friday, November 6, at the Kendall Square.