The Big Chill is a 1983 American comedy-drama film directed by Lawrence Kasdan, starring an ensemble cast consisting of Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, and JoBeth Williams.

The plot focuses on a group of baby boomers who attended the University of Michigan, reuniting after 12 years when their friend Alex committed suicide.

[3] The soundtrack features soul, R&B, and pop-rock music from the 1960s and 1970s, including tracks by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, the Rolling Stones, and Three Dog Night.

[4] After Alex Marshall committed suicide, his fellow University of Michigan alumni and close friends attend his funeral at the Tidalholm plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina.

His other friends include Sam Weber, a television actor; Meg Jones, once a public defender and now a real-estate attorney; Michael Gold, a journalist for People magazine; former talk-radio psychologist Nick Carlton, now an impotent Vietnam vet with a drug addiction; and Karen Bowen, an unfulfilled writer unhappily married to Richard, a conservative advertising executive.

While out jogging early the next morning Harold, violating SEC rules, tells Nick that a large corporation is about to buy his small company, which will make him rich and triple the value of the stock.

Later that night, Meg approaches Sam, but he declines, feeling fatherhood is too great a responsibility as he already has an estranged child.

During a halftime game of touch football, a local police officer escorts a sullen Nick back to the house after he runs a red light and becomes belligerent.

Recognizing Sam, the officer offers to drop charges if he will hop into Nick's Porsche 911 the way his J. T. Lancer character does on TV.

According to a Newsday article, Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedek began writing The Big Chill in September 1980, five months after the release of Return of the Secaucus 7[5] They wrote the screenplay as a semi-autobiographical story inspired by their optimistic political activism while attending college in the 1960s and then their disillusionment at society in the 1970s.

While attending the University of Michigan, Kasdan lived at the Eugene V. Debs Cooperative House in the late 1960s, and his experiences at the co-op informed the direction of the screenplay.

Many of the characters were based on his housemates, and the ways in which they cook communal meals and share their house echo the culture of Ann Arbor cooperatives.

"They rented this big house in Atlanta and installed bead curtains, rock posters, incense, 1968 Life magazines—it was a real time warp."

“I felt so bad about it.”[10] Costner was given a role in Kasdan's next film, the 1985 western Silverado, as Jake, the younger brother of Emmett, played by Scott Glenn, alongside fellow Big Chill cast member Kevin Kline, who played Paden.

The site's critical consensus reads "The Big Chill captures a generation's growing ennui with a terrific cast, a handful of perceptive insights, and one of the decade's best film soundtracks.

Now, in 1983, Harold & Sarah & Sam & Karen & Michael & Meg & Nick—classmates all from the University of Michigan at the end of our last interesting decade—have come to the funeral of a friend who has slashed his wrists.

Alex was a charismatic prodigy of science and friendship and progressive hell raising who opted out of academe to try social work, then manual labor, then suicide.

He is presented as a victim of terminal decompression from the orbital flight of his college years: a worst-case scenario his friends must ponder, probing themselves for symptoms of the disease.

"[14] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four, observing "The Big Chill is a splendid technical exercise.

The story begins "Hal had known Rob and Irene, Jill, Harvey, Tottle, and Pesky since elementary school, and they were all 40 going on 60.