I agree with previous comments about the superficiality of these characters. I disagree with previous comments in that I thought that was the point that Kasdan was trying to make. In this opinion, I may be 180 degrees off, in which case the detractors are correct.
I enjoyed this film in a theater and on television. I liked the snappy patter. I thought there was a plot, albeit a slow-moving one without much action.
For me, the plot revolves around Nick [William Hurt]. This cynic is another disappointed naif who has largely checked out of a world that has disappointed him. He is the member of the ensemble most bent on demystifying the "idealism" of the others and the Sixties. Nick's "cushiest berth" speech is priceless, for example, in unmasking the "misty, watercolor memories" of the poseurs.
Each of the other characters may be "read" as a representative of different strategies for coping with the death of youthful dreams, beliefs, or illusions. Harold [Kevin Kline] is every bit as skeptical about their youth as Nick but has his manufacturing to keep him warm and busy in the present. Sarah [Glenn Close] is a professional who is apparently happiest in her domestic role, no matter what she might have planned in Ann Arbor. Michael [Jeff Golblum] is, in my view, the member who has changed least from a hedonistic, sardonic observer divorced from most of what is going on around him. Berenger, Williams, and Place confront their changes in dialogue, so I shall not belabor them here.
Perhaps most interesting is Chloe [Meg Tilly]. I see Chloe as a latter-day hippie. She exhibits stereotypic features and sentiments of self-absorbed, live-for-today boomers even though she is not one. She alarms some of the ensemble despite the way in which she mirrors the selves that they are all nattering about. [This would be a better story, I believe, and my interpretation of the movie would persuade me more if at least one of the characters acknowledged how much Meg resembles the hippies whom those of us old enough to have know hippies knew.]
In my view, then, the cynical [Nick] is verbally worn down by the delusionals and won over by the realist [Chloe]. At film's end, the delusional chorus are leaving Nick in the arms of the post-boomer hippie. One dark side of the 1960s [drug trafficking] yields to one bright idea of the 1960s [attempted realism] in the form of the one person in the ensemble who doesn't like to dwell in the past.
It ain't Goethe, I'll grant you, but it ain't garbage either.
I enjoyed this film in a theater and on television. I liked the snappy patter. I thought there was a plot, albeit a slow-moving one without much action.
For me, the plot revolves around Nick [William Hurt]. This cynic is another disappointed naif who has largely checked out of a world that has disappointed him. He is the member of the ensemble most bent on demystifying the "idealism" of the others and the Sixties. Nick's "cushiest berth" speech is priceless, for example, in unmasking the "misty, watercolor memories" of the poseurs.
Each of the other characters may be "read" as a representative of different strategies for coping with the death of youthful dreams, beliefs, or illusions. Harold [Kevin Kline] is every bit as skeptical about their youth as Nick but has his manufacturing to keep him warm and busy in the present. Sarah [Glenn Close] is a professional who is apparently happiest in her domestic role, no matter what she might have planned in Ann Arbor. Michael [Jeff Golblum] is, in my view, the member who has changed least from a hedonistic, sardonic observer divorced from most of what is going on around him. Berenger, Williams, and Place confront their changes in dialogue, so I shall not belabor them here.
Perhaps most interesting is Chloe [Meg Tilly]. I see Chloe as a latter-day hippie. She exhibits stereotypic features and sentiments of self-absorbed, live-for-today boomers even though she is not one. She alarms some of the ensemble despite the way in which she mirrors the selves that they are all nattering about. [This would be a better story, I believe, and my interpretation of the movie would persuade me more if at least one of the characters acknowledged how much Meg resembles the hippies whom those of us old enough to have know hippies knew.]
In my view, then, the cynical [Nick] is verbally worn down by the delusionals and won over by the realist [Chloe]. At film's end, the delusional chorus are leaving Nick in the arms of the post-boomer hippie. One dark side of the 1960s [drug trafficking] yields to one bright idea of the 1960s [attempted realism] in the form of the one person in the ensemble who doesn't like to dwell in the past.
It ain't Goethe, I'll grant you, but it ain't garbage either.