You Get What You Need

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE BIG CHILL; Directed by Lawrence Kasdan Written by Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedek

These Americans are in their 30s today, but back then they were the Now Generation. Right Now: give me peace, give me justice, gimme good lovin'. For them, in the voluptuous bloom of youth, the '60s was a banner you could carry aloft or wrap yourself inside. A verdant anarchy of politics, sex, drugs and style carpeted the landscape. And each impulse was scored to the rollick of the new music: folk, rock, pop, R & B. The armies of the night marched to Washington, but they boogied to Liverpool and Motown.

Now, in 1983, Harold & Sarah & Sam & Karen & Michael & Meg & Nick--classmates all from the University of Michigan at the end of our last interesting decade--have come to the funeral of a friend who has slashed his wrists. Alex was a charismatic prodigy of science and friendship and progressive hell raising who opted out of academe to try social work, then manual labor, then suicide. He is presented as a victim of terminal decompression from the orbital flight of his college years: a worst-case scenario his friends must ponder, probing themselves for symptoms of the disease.

Who are these friends, who "knew each other for a short period a long time ago" in a galaxy far, far away? Harold (Kevin Kline), the weekend's host, owns a burgeoning chain of stores that peddles overpriced sneakers to the jogging, today person. His wife Sarah (Glenn Close) is a physician who, five years ago, threw off the "disgusting curse of being a good girl" and had an affair with Alex. Sam (Tom Berenger), once a Movement rhetorician, went to Hollywood and became the macho private eye in a hit TV series, which one of his pals describes as "a sitcom with a machete." Karen (JoBeth Williams), who used to be a closet poet, is now the restless wife of an ad executive. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) made Alex famous by writing about him in the Michigan Daily; now he profiles 14-year-old blind baton twirlers for PEOPLE and tries vainly to assign himself a story on the lost hope he sees around nun this weekend. "You think everything's boring," he snarls to his editor over the phone. "You wouldn't say that if it was the Lost Hope Diet." Meg (Mary Kay Place), a lawyer, got tired of public-defending minority criminals who "were just so ... guilty "and went to work for a posh law firm whose "clients were raping only the land." Nick (William Hurt) went to Viet Nam and got his manhood blown off; now, the impotent cynic, he does and deals drugs.

One of the nice things about this funny and ferociously smart movie is that it is not only about the '60s. Instead, it works from several assumptions about those times to create an impromptu dormitory of likable individuals who know each other well enough to can the sloganeering. Much more is expressed by the way people walk and sit, by the not-quite-facetious insult, by the silent, shared memory. This is a movie about getting through a weekend without being bored or driven to tears, about bull sessions that become psychodramas, about making do and making love and making breakfast the next morning. Like John Sayles' fine film Return of the Secaucus 7, The Big Chill is a house party of reconciliation.

The alien being here is Chloe (Meg Tilly), Alex's ex-girlfriend, a decade younger and more limber, monitoring the action with eyes that have seen it all and ain't telling. You have to make eye contact with this wonderful ensemble of actors; the pregnant or averted glances they exchange constitute a geometry of tangled passions. JoBeth Williams can say more by directing her big sad eyes off-screen than volumes of Emily Dickinson; in Mary Kay Place's squint is the weather-beaten humor of a career woman who wants an emergency jolt of motherhood; William Hurt's eyes move like restless laser beams; Tom Berenger's search the room in masked desperation, trying to crib emotions from his quicker, less guarded friends. No joke or gesture is forced in these performances. The eight star actors deserve one big Oscar.

There is another invisible presence in The Big Chill: that of Film Maker Lawrence Kasdan (Michigan '70). Kasdan came to a kind of shadow prominence writing scripts for George Lucas; if The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi juggle craftiness with kid-innocence, it is partly owing to Kasdan's easy wit and trove of B-movie lore. His debut as a writerdirector, Body Heat, updated the Double Indemnity plot with equal measures of fire and ice. The Big Chill marks another sure step forward for Kasdan. This is a movie that can extend outside the confines of movie genres, with characters whose lives seep outside the screen frame, who persuade the viewer to care about their pasts and futures.

It also boasts a great Greatest Hits sound track, which finds just the right comic or dramatic settings for such fine '60s songs as You Can't Always Get What You Want, Good Lovin', Ain 't Too Proud to Beg and A Natural Woman. Indeed, the entire film is a kind of sock-hop benefit for Approaching Middle Age. This maturing generation never played Taps with such glamour or good humor. Play the music and let the big chill--the knowledge that "we're all alone out there, and we're going out there tomorrow"--melt away in the warmth of the feel-good movie of '83. --By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.