Cinema: You Get What You Need

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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