The Big Chill and Beaufort

I was at the intersection of Church and King Streets one afternoon about a month ago when a Jeep, open to the breeze, drove by. There were three or four youngish men in it. Just as it passed the wall of St. Helena’s Church, the Jeep’s stereo blasted forth with "Jeremiah was a bull-frog; was a good friend of mine . . . ," and suddenly I realized what the men were doing. They were re-living a scene from The Big Chill. Part of me said "Get a life!" but another part said "That’s cool."
Perhaps they couldn’t jog down a deserted, foggy Bay Street in the very early morning as did Kevin Kline and William Hurt, and perhaps they couldn’t drive into Hilda Holstein’s driveway in a vintage black Porsche like William Hurt, with the dope hidden in the car’s undercarriage. But they had gotten the Jeep somewhere and they were going to by-God drive by that church wall with that particular late-Sixties song blaring from the stereo–they wanted so hard to be a part of the movie they loved. (Actually, the song playing in the very short Jeep scene was Credence Clearwater Revival’s "Bad Moon Rising," but what the hell: "Joy to the World" begins and ends the movie.)

The Big Chill is a movie that deserves its cult status. It is a Baby Boomer movie, and a reunion movie, yes, but it is serious, and funny, and life-affirming, even if its title is a joke about death. By now we know that the corpse in the coffin, never seen except for the top of his head, his feet, and his wrist with the stitches from his suicide, is Kevin Costner (his living scenes were cut from the movie), and we know how just about all the actors in the movie went on to at least semi-brilliant careers, the most outstanding being Kevin Kline (who has played Hamlet, Bottom, and Falstaff). Glenn Close has performed very well in everything from Fatal Attraction to Broadway musicals; William Hurt has played his intellectually cool sex appeal in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat and many other films above B grade; and Tom Beringer is perhaps at his most memorable as the military sergeant sociopath in Platoon. Jeff Goldblum gives his bright intensity to everything from the re-make of The Fly to Jurassic Park. Together, in the movie, they seemed to be genuine friends, and they probably became so during the fifty-some days they worked together in Los Angeles and in Beaufort.

Mrs. Holstein’s house on The Point is often just referred to as "The Big Chill house," and it is true that in the movie the house develops a personality of its own, from the attic to the basement. The kitchen scene where all the actors wander in and eventually start dancing, so gracefully, to the Temptations’s "Ain’t too Proud to Beg," is etched in the memory of America. The scenes on the porch or on the dock make the viewer want to live in that house, and, for us Baby Boomers who lived through the loose and lecherous Sixties, the basement scene with Meg Tilley coming to the door in her chemise and panties has ever since been a mnemonic turn-on for more than just Jeff Goldblum. And then there is the vivid scene with Glenn Close, vulnerably naked, weeping unashamedly sitting in the shower, which, rather than just engendering desire for Glenn Close and earning the movie an R rating, brought home the power of grief at the useless death of a young man who has been loved by all those once-idealistic and radical University of Michigan students during the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

The director Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedik wrote the witty script, remarkably timeless considering that the movie was released in 1983 and concerns fictional characters who were in college in 1969. Kasdan even allowed his adorable son to sing "Joy to the World" in the bathtub and his wife to play an airline hostess serving vodka to Tom Beringer, betraying a low budget for extras but sending family postcards to the friends of the Kasdans.

What is rich about the movie is the characters of the fiction, and the house and town where the main characters live. Glenn Close was the only actor in the film nominated for an Oscar, perhaps for that scene in the shower, but, because the cast is an ensemble, her nomination was for Best Supporting Actress. All eight major actors equally deserved the nomination.

The Big Chill put Beaufort on the map and made it part of American mythology. The mythology was persistent. The Big Chill taught 1980s movie-viewers to snort coke as William Hurt did in the movie, if they had enough money to buy it, but the dope-dealer in the movie, the William Hurt character, is not a role-model or a happy man, since he "hates his life," though his sarcasm and cynicism is often funny. (Some reviewers have called the movie a "comedy of manners," and so does its director). The dope-dealer gets away with his possession of quaaludes and various other illegal pills, his stash of marijuana, and his cocaine, even if the Vietnam War has made him impotent. At least he gets to drive the Porsche, even if he can’t make love to the luscious ballerina flower child Meg Tilley. Though she is a latter-day hippie and out of synch with the self-reflexive Sixties radicals, the character that Tilley plays is allowed to say "I haven’t met that many happy people in my life. How do they act?" which shows that she is not a complete air-head but has a thoughtful side as well as a beautiful body. Actually, the William Hurt character will be living with her in a cabin in Beaufort after the movie ends, if you pay attention to the contrived happy ending.

The town is a character in The Big Chill, and Beaufort has character that the movie is sensitive to. It is no accident that the wonderful ensemble of actors (including Jobeth Williams and Mary Kay Place) returned to Beaufort for a reunion, I think ten years after the movie came out.

No, I won’t ride around Beaufort in a Jeep in order to re-live the movie, but I appreciate The Big Chill because it taught me something about how enchanting the town is, as well as reminding me about all the joys of living in the era of sex, drugs, camaraderie, and rock and roll.