Screen:

...The result is fun, superficial, relaxing...

...His previous effort as a director, Body Heat, is a classy film noir...

...There have been previous occasions when a friend from high school or college, someone my own age, had died...

...But by the time the class reunion follows the coffin outside, Jagger and the rest of the Stones have kicked in with the original version of the song...

...His script credits extend from sci-fi epic like The Empire Strikes Back to romantic comedy like Continental Divide...

...The Big Chill runs more to melodrama and deft farce...

...My friend had not left behind a lot of unrealized hopes...

...Meg is unhappy because she can't get a man or have a family to raise...

...Ditto," adds Meg (Mary Kay Place...

...Karen is unhappy because she has the very things Meg feels the lack of...

...We caught up on each other's news as if it were important, though most of us will never see each other again...

...I'd forgotten what this is like," he says, looking around at present company...

...With this movie I think Kas-dan is just trying to keep certain options alive within himself...

...If the brightness comes from the sparks that jump between characters who make contact again during the weekend, the darker implications seem to lie in the parallels that exist elsewhere, between those characters who do not have heart-to-heart talks with one another...

...Attending the memorial service was like being old owl eyes at the funeral of J. Gatsby...

...It is this faint undertone of misgiving that gives the movie's bright spots and high points their bite...

...No matter which way you have it, things don't seem to work out...

...In L.A., I don't know who to trust...

...But in the past my reaction has always been, "Taken before his time...

...This is the kind of snappy dialogue Kasdan did so well in Body Heat...

...He had died of old age...

...There is no way to choose among them...

...At one point Harold, who tries to get the others to go jogging with him every morning, buys running shoes for each of his guests...

...The beat is picking up...

...This was a shock, though not exactly a surprise, for the friend had been a hard liver, an alcoholic...

...Nothing is resolved about their relationships by the film's end...

...Sarah and Meg talk a good deal, for instance, particularly about the latter's desire to have a child even though she has no husband...

...Despite the somber occasion that brings these seven people together again, the atmosphere is far from elegaic...

...Sarah is so generous and understanding that she arranges for her own husband to serve as stud, which prompts Meg to make to him the movie's best remark: "I feel like I just got a great deal on a used car.'' Yet it is Meg and Karen who bear more interesting relationship to each other, even if they hardly exchange two words...

...I returned from a trip to find a message on my answering machine that a friend from college had died...

...That's the nagging doubt at the back of Kasdan's mind he makes with the jokes in scene after scene...

...Another classmate, Howard (Kevin Kline), has gone completely to pieces delivering the eulogy, so the funeral has been somewhat grim...

...Whatever self-pity or reflectiveness was about to creep in, it has had the ground cut from under it before we can take it seriously...

...He handles all genres equally well...

...After a pause, Harold replies, "You don't have that problem here...

...Nick (William Hurt), the most abrasive but also most attractive man, has been rendered impotent in Vietnam...

...This time was different...

...Michael, the wittiest but least well liked of the group, tries without success to get women to sleep with him...

...You know I don't like you...

...Yeah, but they can't finish it," Michael laments...

...Everybody needs them, for the movie is a fast track...

...Me neither," says Michael...

...We were half musing on ourselves, and half brooding...

...They're all charming, all likeable in their fashion...

...Although Kasdan only came to prominence a few years ago, he has already shown considerable range as a filmmaker...

...It's inevitable with eight central characters-in addition to the seven former classmates, there's the dead Alex's girlfriend, Chloe (Meg Tilly)-that the pace is brisk...

...He and co-scriptwriter Barbara Benedek never let the conversation get mawkish for more than a few seconds...

...But the joking had a raspy edge to it...

...I recognized that I had crossed a watershed in my own life...

...Nobody still had expectations of him that must now be regretted...

...Despite the film's ebullience, however, I think that in it Kasdan is really worrying a bit about his own success...

...After each scene, the dice are rolled and a new combination of characters comes up...

...This is why the mood changes constantly...

...The most eloquent among us gave a eulogy...

...Or why they like me, or even if theylikeme...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...All the different roles are his and Ms...

...Michael (Jeff Goldblum) is explaining the only editorial rule at People magazine, where he works...

...Kasdan's own ambivalences remain intact...

...It's entertaining in the same way...

...I don't know what people think of me...

...During the weekend that everyone spends as house guests of Harold and his wife Sarah (Glenn Close), director-writer Lawrence Kas-dan keeps things lively...

...Many people who were there I had scarcely seen in ten years...

...Yet he gets the woman Michael has spent the whole weekend trying to score with...

...The' 'chill'' had come for me as soon as I got the message off my machine...

...When I and the others at my friend's funeral went to that bar afterwards, there was a lot of banter...

...You can't write anything longer than the average person can read during the average crap," he says...

...At the funeral of Alex, who has killed himself, his old college classmate Karen (Jobeth Williams) plays this tune...

...And the parallels among the men are equally sharp, acrid...

...Look at the way the mood changes, and then quickly changes back again, while everybody sits around drinking the night after the funeral...

...Benedek's conflicted selves...

...The autumn weekend these people are passing together is like one we might spend playing a board game...

...The Big Chill begins on a similar note, if not a sympathetic one...

...yet at the same time, he fears that some best self within him has already died...

...In this movie, he has divided himself up into four of them and chased himself around the screen...

...So is Kasdan...

...It is the first note of "You Can't Always Get What You Want," a song that the Rolling Stones recorded in the sixties...

...But now spirits flag as Sarah is overwhelmed by memories, and Sam (Tom Be-renger), who stars in a television series, bemoans the falseness of friends he has made since college in show biz...

...The group that gathers after Alex's funeral is a fairly even mix of malcontents and over-achievers...

...Harold points out that, ' 'People read Dostoyevsky in the can...

...they are embodiments of old cynicisms and new self-doubts...

...Sarah and Chloe are complementary personalities too, and have certain crucial experiences in common...

...He is a man of many parts...

...Afterwards, we all went over to our friend's favorite bar on First Avenue and had a few drinks...

...The action moves to a new set of squares for a few minutes...