The paraphrase Andrew Sarris, one should not condemn a movie due to budgetary limitations. You’re falling into the trap of “surface” (see Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Chapter 6). You’re seeing only the surface elements of the film, which are the easiest part and take the least artistic skill. Indeed, the comparison between the two films is one (of many) examples about how people make judgements on art due to superficial factors – and the superficial factors are trivial to achieve.
I’ll also say that, overall, John Sayles is a much better screenwriter than Kasdan.
I was not judging anything. I was literally unable to decipher a lot of the dialogue; I’ve had an easier time understanding dialogue in Scouse or Glaswegian accents. I was unable to get more than a basic sense of the settings and the characters’ appearance. If I could see a better print, I would be able to judge the film on its merits. With the video I saw, I could not get to the deeper meanings.
Interesting. You must have seen a very bad print. I don’t recall any problems understanding or seeing things. About the only issue was that it was natural sound, not post-production, but that’s easy to filter out.
I remember reading that the production budget for Secaucus Seven was something like $60,000–most of which was put on credit cards. I have a feeling that $60,000 wouldn’t have even covered the cocaine buget for The Big Chill.
I was going to post to say that I was one of the few who saw SS before BC, but after reading this thread I would guess that there many have been more than a few. It was a well known film in the Boston/Cambridge area after it was released.
My feeling for the first few years after BC was released was that it was indeed a rip-off of SS. And an inferior copy, at that, for all its technical superiority and acting talent. I haven’t seen either for years, so my (probably clouded) memory may be reading sub-texts that weren’t there, but I now view them as distinctly different films with distinctly different messages. I’ll compare, but forgive me if I get some of the details wrong after all these years.
SS focused on a group of former friends who had moved on with their lives after their arrest, but had tried to keep their idealism alive in whatever life they chose (teacher, social worker, musician). Their reunion was a subtle and nuanced look into where one might really expect those folks. They were struggling with their own very real demons (drug use, loneliness, financial hardship, self doubt), and it was very easy to find oneself feeling sympathy and kinship. John Sayles’ little soliloquy on having a family, comparing them to his high school car, was a priceless little gem.
BC, on the other hand, focused on a group of former acquaintances who really don’t and didn’t seem to like each other very much. At least not as much as they liked themselves. It is very difficult to find any character that is likeable. (Okay, Kevin Kline, but that’s him and not his role.) They have, however, managed to become fabulously successful in their careers (CEO, movie star, high priced lawyer, I forget the rest). Careers in which one rarely advances without a certain amount of moral compromise. It is difficult to reconcile that with the supposed idealism that led to their own arrests. The message I take away is either that they once had true ideals that they lost along the way (probably the intent of the film’s message, but one that is optimistic at best), or more likely that they never truly believed what they had once espoused. To me, they epitomize the popular opinion of “Hollywood liberals”, and it cheapened the beliefs that many of us had during those troubling and turbulent times. It makes one think that Kevin Costner’s character was the only one who had the right idea.
The characters in The Big Chill are sell-outs. It’s not even clear that they ever much believed in the ideals they espoused, or if their leftism in college was just a fashion statement for them. They all came from well-off families and as soon as they got tired of trying to live by their ideals, they gave them up and got jobs making lots of money. Notice that at one point Kevin Kline’s character tells William Hurt’s character that the price of the stock in his company is going to go up a lot because a deal he (Kline) just made, so he (Hurt) should buy some of it and make money. In other words, he (Kline) is telling him (Hurt) to engage in insider-trading. As one critic said, if my friends were as jerky as Kevin Costner’s characters were, I’d commit suicide too.
The characters in The Return of the Secaucus Seven are idealists who’ve made their peace with the world. They’ve taken the jobs that are as close to their ideals as possible while allowing them to live on them. The dialogue in TROTSS sounds like things real people might say, while the dialogue in TBC sounds scripted.
I was less concerned about whether TBC was a rip-off. I read a comment once from someone who knew the sister of Barbara Benedek, the co-writer of TBC, who said that this sister’s life story was very much like Mary Kay Place’s character’s life story. So perhaps there are people like those in TBC (although less of them than people like those in TSOTSS). I’m not sure if we supposed to like the characters in TBC or despise them.
I loved The Big Chill[sup]1[/sup] when I first saw it. It is a very good movie about a generation older than my own. I love the music and the characters seem well crafted. The actors were all good.
I think The Secret of Roan Inish[sup]2[/sup] is one of those little obscure movies that are nearly perfect so as an experiment I just added Return of the Secaucus 7 to the Top of my Netflix Queue. I will see the movie this and report back by the end of the week. I have seen **Lissener ** talk about this subject before. I am now very curious.
Jim
1 I would rate The Big Chill a solid 7 or 8 on IMDB.
2 The one John Sayles movie I know. He wrote and directed it IIRC. Wow, I just discovered he also wrote and directed Eight Men Out (1988). I love this movie and consider it another 10.
Okay, I see that SS is on DVD, with audio commentary by Sayles. If the local video stores don’t have it, I can probably find a used copy. If it’s as wonderful as I’m being told, I might want to own it. I’m not kidding when I say the print I saw was that bad, so it seems that effectively, I have not seen it at all.
Still not going to devalue BC, though. I still don’t think it was a “ripoff”, or even an attempt to tell the same story. We’re talking about a very large generation, so the idea of two of its members wanting to tell a story with a similar premise does not have to be more than a coincidence. (And to be honest ::donning flameproof undies:: that generation is pretty darn full of itself. I’m surprised there are not more such films.)
See, the moral compromises/hypocrisy of the BC characters does not offend me, because I’m one of those horrible Gen-Xers who were such a disappointment to the class of '68. I was 15 when I saw BC, and although my parents were older and not members of that generation, I and my peers were beginning to get a lot of grief about you-kids-with-your-MTV-video-games-when-I-was-your-age. How dare we care about material things; how dare we not hate Reagan; how dare we not defy them when they tried to goad us into it. (Not kidding about that either.) It was actually a relief to me to be given a glimpse of what was behind that “we used to be COMMITTED!” facade. I can see how people of that generation would be offended, but for me, it was reassurance that I didn’t have as much to live up to as I was being told.
What bothered me about TBC was that it seemed so schematic–everyone represented a “type” of who they were and who they became, and the oh-so-convenient pairings up, the facile resolutions, and the intravenous nostalgia of the (incessant) soundtrack selections–songs that are calculated to make you feel good about the era, but (except for the song in the opening credits) have very little to do with the story or characterizations. This is the cheapest kind of manipulation, where the songs do the heavy lifting because the film itself is so lightweight. It’s generally well-acted (especially by Hurt & Kline), but there’s so little there, and Plynch makes a good point about how we’re invited to empathize with the lot of them, when they all seem so overpriviledged and spoiled into bouts of self-pitying, mid-life crisis navel-gazing. Everybody behaved the way I’d expect them to in a movie, which means not resembling anything I’d recognize in real life, but that’s largely because we’re expected to think that they’re all, in some way, “cool” (except the Goldblum character, and he’s just “funny”).
TRotSS didn’t have a pressing story arc, no urgent conflicts to resolve, and there was a more diverse selection of people portrayed (economically, idealogically) which made the reunion dynamics feel more “real” (the shoestring budget added to this feel, though I agree that you must have been subjected to a remarkably bad print). Plus, John Sayles is simply a better writer than Kasdan, and that counts for a lot. I wouldn’t say necessarily TBC ripped Sayles off per se, but it did take an already familiar premise and “mainstream” it to make it more “audience-friendly” (in a pandering sort of way). I’d liken it to how Go Tell the Spartans (which nobody saw and made little impact in the larger industry) ended up doing a better job than the two Vietnam movies that came out the following year: The Deer Hunter & Apocalypse Now, both infinitely better known but not, IMHO, as good.
Any of his films is an almost must-see. Lone Star, Passionfish, Baby It’s You. He has an amazing ear for authentic dialogue and picks up on regional mores over a weekend.
I was just old enough to see The Big Chill so I didn’t know Return of the Secaucus Seven until years later. I respect the latter more for being more true (and because I have bias toward John Sayles).
Right: they were jerks. Just like my teachers were often jerkish, and my friends’ parents. But now I’m eager to see Sayle’s film, to see if I find those characters more sympathetic. (I still might not, just so you know.)
And Wendell, I had totally forgotten about that exchange! And don’t forget Goldblum’s character, griping about his superficial job (“I once did a rock band in a page and a half and they had two drummers” – hee!) but what he really wants is investors for his club, because money and ownership is what will really make him feel accomplished. I’m well aware of the phoniness of these characters; I just didn’t realize that that was why people found it so offensive. From my perspective, I didn’t expect people pushing 40 to be any other way.
It’s been a very long time, but I lovedReturn of the Secaucus Seven. Like others have said, I recognized myself and my friends (I was about the same age as the characters in the film when it came out). It was like spending an evening with people I knew: IIRC, they talked about the same things we did, dressed the same way, laughed at stuff we would’ve laughed at. TRSS was dead on accurate. It got us right.
The Big Chill might’ve been about my generation, too, in a slick, prettied up, affluent Hollywood way. It just didn’t ring true for me.
Wonder if boomers tend to prefer Return of the Secaucus Seven?
Secaucus itself has often been said to be a ripoff/inspired by the Swiss movie Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000, so we should all hesitate to throw stones for unoriginality. As Neil Gaiman has said, fiction is a stewpot; we all add to and take from it.
For some reason, my favorite Sayles film is–and almost everyone I know disagrees with me on this–is Men with Guns. Although *Limbo *and Brother from Another Planet are way up there.
> As one critic said, if my friends were as jerky as Kevin Costner’s characters
> were, I’d commit suicide too.
I meant:
> As one critic said, if my friends were as jerky as Kevin Costner’s character’s
> friends were, I’d commit suicide too.
Rilchiam writes:
> I was 15 when I saw BC, and although my parents were older and not
> members of that generation, I and my peers were beginning to get a lot of grief
> about you-kids-with-your-MTV-video-games-when-I-was-your-age.
I don’t know of any politically active types from the 1960’s who (in the 1980’s) did a lot of berating younger people about how they weren’t politically active. Yes, there were some Baby Boomers who did this, but Baby Boomers are a diverse group, and you shouldn’t assume that someone of that age was politically active. Most weren’t. Many of those who were active were conservatives.
Furthermore, note that the characters in The Big Chill don’t spend a lot of time berating younger people. They spend a lot of time berating themselves. At some level, they know they’re sell-outs and are ashamed of it.
Boy I do, and it was really annoying. It’s not hard to be activist when you’re facing a draft lottery. Looming death is a great radicalizer. Generation X had no such motivation.
As for the films, I’ve seen both, and while I love John Sayles’s other work, I didn’t much care for Return of the Secaucus Seven.
Also I have a cynical theory: I think Boomers don’t like The Big Chill because it suggests some ugly truths about their generation: namely, that a lot of the activism was “just fashion,” and that a lot of Boomers eagerly sold out their (proclaimed) ideals and became Yuppies in the 80s. On the other hand, Boomers love Secaucus Seven because the characters are mostly still idealistic, and this lets the Boomers feel good about themselves.