Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Cast: Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A part of me has always had a vague ambition to write something like this that is divorced from genre and is just people existing.
Did I Like It: And yet another part of me has resolutely refused to do anything of the sort*. The dialogue on display here is almost uniformly great, the performances are pitch perfect (Kline and Goldblum especially are naturally living in their eventual screen personas during their nearly first at bat), and the soundtrack is so perfect that it’s hard to think of “Joy to the World” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”** without thinking about the film.
But, and I say this with absolute sincerity and honesty: I don’t get it.
Maybe it’s a generational thing. Facebook oozed into existence while I was still in college, so the idea of losing touch with the people in your life at that moment is as technologically quaint as the VHS camera treated like the Monolith throughout the film. I can see the need to show up for a funeral, but the motivation behind staying for an entire weekend with people, as Nick (Hurt) correctly points out, “a long time ago knew each other for a short period of time” absolutely mystifies me. This, even more so when I realize I am not older than the characters at the time the story takes place.
This doesn’t even begin to cover the problem solving and attempts at emotional maturity here. Apparently allowing Harold (Kline) to impregnate Meg (Mary Kay Place) resolves all of the other infidelity? Everyone’s fine now? What about when Meg has a kid and they have to explain to Harold and Sarah’s (Close) current children that they’ve had a younger sibling this entire time, and that the origin of how their father came to father another child out of wedlock will only invite more questions than answers.
Maybe its just a generational thing. Boomers, man. I just don’t know.
*I’m not going to give up the ghost on doing a story about college friends reuniting years-plus later, only to find that Kevin Kline is deeply deranged and wants to wear them all as coats as soon as possible.
**Which somehow isn’t included in the soundtrack album, which is either a sign that the label was legendarily dumb, the Rolling Stones are infinitely greedy, or some mixture of both.