   Mediation and midlife-crisis movies  Bookmark and Share
Thursday, Apr 14, 2011  Perhaps in anticipation of an incipient
midlife crisis, I recently watched John Sayles’s 1980 film
Return of the Secaucus 7 and then The Big Chill (1983), one of
the “what happened to us, we used to be so cool!” movies that
came in its wake. Though the films are similarly structured—they
both focus on a weekend-long reunion of baby-boomer friends
during which they drink a lot, play sports, hookup illicitly and
indulge in nostalgic reveries—they are entirely different in
tone.  Sayles’s film is loose and subtle, populated with
nonactors and aiming for a kind of organic naturalism, whereas
The Big Chill is full of histrionic Hollywood stars and ham-
fisted thematic exposition. (Early on, Jeff Goldblum has a phone
conversation in which he basically explains what the movie is
supposed to be about. Very meta.) The acting in Secaucus 7 is
not particularly convincing in a conventional sense, but the
stiltedness starts to connote authen