The Big Chill (1983) on Netflix
Seven friends from their University of Michigan days come together in South Carolina after Alex Marshall, one of their group, takes his own life. The Coopers host them for the weekend.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.1/1046,027 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
Alex Marshall's suicide brings his old University of Michigan classmates back together. They travel to South Carolina for his funeral and stay for the weekend at the home of Harold and Sarah Cooper, a married couple in the group. Chloe, Alex's girlfriend of four months, is much younger than he was and had been living in the Coopers' basement. The others include Sam Weber, a television actor, Meg Jones, Michael Gold, Nick Carlton and Karen Bowen. The friends, now in their thirties, have kept in touch through the years, though their lives have changed since college.
Cast
- James Gillisas Minister
- Ken Placeas Peter the Cop
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Big Chill (1983)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kevin Costner was cast as Alex Marshall, the friend whose fellow University of Michigan alumni and close friends attend his funeral after his suicide, but all of Costner's scenes were cut from the film.
- According to Kasdan it was his own decision to axe the scenes, telling the Toronto Star "It didn't work" and "I felt so bad about it"; Costner was then given a role in Kasdan's next film, the 1985 western Silverado, as Jake, the younger brother of Emmett, played by Scott Glenn.
- JoBeth Williams recalled shooting a scene flashing back to the characters in 1968, for which the production rented a big house in Atlanta and installed beaded curtains, rock posters, incense and 1968 Life magazines; she called it "a real time warp".
- While attending the University of Michigan, Kasdan lived at the Eugene V. Debs Cooperative House in the late 1960s, and many of the film's characters were based on his housemates, their communal meals and house-sharing echoing the culture of Ann Arbor cooperatives.
- Kasdan's wife Meg was placed in charge of compiling period-appropriate songs for the soundtrack, and heard "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" for the first time in years while picking her son up at camp, listening to a Marvin Gaye cassette, and was struck by how it would make a perfect start to the film.
- It was decided before filming that "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" by The Temptations would be used for the cleanup after dinner scene, so the cast were given headphones to hear the song while shooting, making it easier for them to keep the beat.
- While the other characters in the film were not written with any specific actors in mind, Kasdan wrote the role of Nick for Body Heat's star William Hurt, who gave Kasdan a commitment to do The Big Chill.
- In 2025, The Big Chill was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."
