What Makes Good Dialogue?: "The Big Chill"

When I first came to Hollywood, a friend of mine who's been out here for a long time suggested I should find an angle to use when I pitched myself as a writer. "I think my dialogue is pretty good," I said, with perhaps more modesty than I felt.

He smiled.

"Everyone thinks their dialogue is good," was his reply.

And it's true. Every writer in this town believes, deep in their heart, that they write great, searing, witty, profoundly human dialogue that reveals the essence of a character or a scene in a mere handful of lines. And some of them are even right.

What one learns, though, the more films one watches and the more scripts one reads, is that like most artistic endeavors dialogue writing is not a schematic enterprise. There is no template, no formula, nothing that can be pointed to isolation from what’s around it and declared successful.

Put one way, this means that there can be no definitional consensus on what constitutes "good" dialogue: Chayefsky's intensely intelligent and articulate characters work in certain contexts, Ephron's anxiety-ridden urbanites work in others, May's goofy ironists and Wilder's sharp-edged wisecrackers work in yet others. Put differently, it means that good dialogue is nothing more or less than an integrated element of the movie in which it appears. Alone, it carries few echoes; it's only in the context of everything else on the screen that it becomes resonant.

Thus the dialogue in The Big Chill.

Released in 1983, directed by Lawrence Kasdan and written by Kasdan and Barbara Benedek, The Big Chill is an attempt to come to terms with the aspirations and decisions of a generation formed by historical mayhem.

It tells the story of a reunion of a group of friends who were students together at the University of Michigan during the late 1960s and shared the deep-held beliefs of many young people at the time about the political, social, and sexual revolutions that marked the era. In their thirties now, they've gathered at the South Carolina vacation home of Sarah and Harold (Glenn Close and Kevin Kline), because a charismatic but spiritually-marooned friend of the group named Alex (played by Kevin Costner in footage that was cut from the film) has committed suicide.

After Alex's funeral, the moment of remembrance and reunion extends and the friends all decide to stay for the weekend. Each has a briefly-delineated but resonant backstory. Sam (Tom Berenger) has become an actor in a successful TV show along the lines of Magnum P.I.; Karen (JoBeth Williams) has entered into a stable but unhappy marriage; Meg (Mary Kay Place) is a successful lawyer but has been unable to find love and wants desperately to have a child; Michael (Jeff Goldblum) writes vacuous material for People Magazine; Nick (William Hurt) was rendered impotent by a wound in Vietnam and now spends his time using and peddling drugs. There’s also Chloe (Meg Tilly) who was Alex's girlfriend and is a generation younger than the rest.

All of the friends have, that is, moved into various permutations of adulthood and have mostly given up on the radical '60s dreams of their youth. Sarah (a doctor) and Harold (a businessman) have earned a great deal of money, as has Sam out in Hollywood. "Who would have thought we’d make so much bread?" asks Harold. "Two revolutionaries," agrees Sam, ironically, before saying of the people who would judge them: "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke."

Similarly, Michael has given up on dreams of becoming a serious writer and Karen's marriage stands in direct contrast to the passionate affairs of her youth. It's only Nick who still clings to some vestige of rebelliousness, and this seems to be mostly a function of the depression and rage brought on by his injury.

The film is not exactly plotless, but is more concerned with working through issues of friendship, lost idealism, and coming to terms with aging than it is with narrating a series of events. The characters spend a lot of time talking. In particular, they spend a lot of time talking about the past – Alex, once the charismatic fulcrum of the entire group, is very much on their minds – and about the differences between the people they were and the people they are. This nostalgia is a bit mysterious to the younger Chloe, who voices an idea that has perhaps occurred to the audience as well when she notes: "I don't like talking about my past as much as you guys do."

There are any number of interesting things to be said about the film, including the way it understands the generation known as Baby Boomers, and indeed any generation that comes of age with a certain set of ideals only to have those ideals put under pressure by the economic system in which they find themselves operating. One suspects that in a decade or so, we'll begin to see similar films made by people who are now in their twenties and will then be in their thirties, attempting to deal with similar issues.

Despite all this, though, what's always fascinated me about The Big Chill is the writing, particularly in the first third of the movie.

In any ensemble film, one of the writer's main jobs is to delineate characters and situations as quickly as possible. With eight main characters here, there's simply not enough screen time to allow for long-winded expositions about who they are and what they stand for.

The Big Chill is nicely directed by Kasdan, and is full of early visual moments that help us understand the identities of these people. Sam, for example, is riding in first class on an airplane and sees a picture of himself on the cover of a celebrity magazine when we first meet him; Nick, in contrast, is driving a beat-up Porsche while he pops pills, and he shows up late to the funeral.

These introductions are then extended through the first sequences in which we see the characters interact with each other, which are often no more than two or three exchanges long. It's here that the wonders of the dialogue begin.

After the funeral service at the church, for example, Meg is riding with Nick in his Porsche on the way to the cemetery. We cut in on them as she puffs on a joint he's given her. "That's pretty strong stuff," he remarks. "Ugh," she says, nodding, "I feel terrible. The last time I spoke with Alex, we had a fight. I yelled at him." Nick, staring straight ahead, remarks, in a gently teasing tone: "That's probably why he killed himself."

With only a couple lines, the audience has already been given an enormous amount of information. Meg and Nick used to smoke dope together; she doesn’t anymore but he still does, which is why he warns her about the potency of the joint. She's feeling remorse and he, as an old friend, reassures her: You are not the reason Alex killed himself.

At the same time, as he will throughout the film, Nick is gently pointing out the slight hypocrisy of her sentiment: it's Alex who is dead, Alex who was in despair, and Meg is using the moment to feel bad about herself. A good deal of Nick's character is present in the comment: he’s the person who will call attention to the current self-absorption and abandonment of ideals of the group, but always with a slight bitterness (and he will be later called to account for this cynicism.)

The conversation then continues, after an intervening shot of the hearse rolling down the road. "What was the argument about?" Nick asks. "I told him he was wasting his life," comes Meg's reply.

With these final two lines – typical of the mordant humor throughout – the polarization of the initial exchange is reversed. Meg's regret is well-founded and is not just bourgeois self-absorption: after she accused Alex of wasting his life he did exactly that, in the greatest way imaginable. And Nick's truth-telling is, at times, too flippant, too dismissive. At the same time, the final exchange reveals that Meg, and by extension the group as a whole, were deeply invested enough in Alex to be angry with him for not taking care of himself.

The lines are not simply funny and touching, and they don't simply reveal for us who the characters are: they also help build the fabric of the film itself.

Meanwhile, Sam and Chloe are in Sam's car, with Michael in the back seat. Sam and Michael are both concerned about Chloe: it is, after all, her boyfriend's funeral. "You alright?" asks Sam. "Yeah," says Chloe, "I'm a little disappointed though – I wanted to ride up there." The men nod in understanding.

Then Chloe continues, gesturing at the hearse in front of them: "I've always wanted to ride in a limo."

The men look at each other for a beat, allowing the line to land. For the first half of the film, Chloe will be seen by the group, and by the viewer, as a strange, almost vacant young creature who seems unaffected by Alex's death. It's only slowly that they will come to realize she's a free spirit who came out of a terrible childhood to find a kind of spiritual peace in the world: a person they would have recognized, that is, when they were her age.

The exchange continues when Michael notes: "I do half my work in limos." Michael is both awkward and the only one of the group who will own up to being self-absorbed. ("All that's happening is I'm trying to get what I want," he will say later on. "Which is what everybody does, it's just that some of their styles are so warm or charming or sincere or otherwise phony that you don't realize they're just trying to get what they want. So you see, my transparent efforts are in a way much more honest and admirable.") He will also spend the weekend trying to get Chloe to sleep with him. Both the awkwardness and his attempt to woo her through impressing her are here in his opening salvo about working in limos.

Chloe, however, is immune to his charms. "Are you a chauffeur?" she asks, her second really funny line of the scene, although the laugh is now not at her expense but Michael’s. "No, I'm a journalist," is his reply. "I work for People Magazine." At this point, the scene has broadened again to include Sam, who laughs audibly. He and Michael have an exchange in which it becomes clear that the magazine ran a negative piece about Sam, and then Chloe jumps back in to say to Sam: "And you're an actor?" Now Michael laughs audibly.

In a half page of dialogue, the scene has shifted from Chloe's strange naiveté to Michael and Sam's conflicts, pretensions and anxieties. The world has divided the old friends, their jobs as tabloid reporter and actor putting them on the opposite sides of a publicity dispute. But the dialogue also reveals for the first time that neither Michael nor Sam has accomplished what they set out to: Michael's defensiveness about his job and desire to be more are laid bare by the matching of the lines "I'm a journalist" (with the seriousness that word implies, seconded by Goldblum’s delivery) and "I work for People Magazine" (with the fatuousness that magazine implies.)

Sam's derisive snort calls attention to this disjunction. But then Sam's situation is immediately given the same treatment. Once desiring to be a well-regarded actor, he has instead ended up on a high-paying but unserious TV show, and the scene is so well written and acted that all it takes to reveal this is Michael’s laugh echoing Sam’s from a moment before. (Sam’s predicament is reinforced later on when he’s asked to replicate a stunt from the show's intro where he leaps into a convertible. He fails, injuring himself in the process: not only has he found himself stuck in the role of J.T. Lancer, Private Eye, he can’t even perform that role to impress people.)

So the dialogue in these opening sequences not only introduces the characters and their personalities, it also begins weaving the thematics of the film.

If the conversation between Meg and Nick presents us with the question of the group's culpability in Alex's demise (spiritual as well as physical) the exchange between Michael, Sam, and Chloe introduces us to the way that the characters' dreams – of success, of noble callings, of making a difference in the world – have been eaten up by the actuality of their lives.

And both sequences (as do many in the film) involve a turn. The characters who have initially seemed reasonable are then shown to have their own problems: Nick’s clarity of vision is revealed to be too cynical by half, and Michael and Sam’s astonishment at Chloe’s behavior flips over into revelations of their own failures. This structuring of the scenes directly reflects the movie’s concerns as a whole: as an ensemble piece, it’s less interested in presenting some vision of morality or normality than in exploring the human strengths and weaknesses of every character.

In subsequent scenes, each of the characters is given similar, brief, and deeply incisive moments. Karen listens to her husband (Don Galloway, whose late-night discourse on responsibility is one of the film's best monologues) talk about how none of her friends are as he imagined them, showing both her passive position in the relationship and her husband's inability to comprehend the social milieu that formed her and her friends.

Moments later, we learn that Karen and Sam were lovers in college and are still carrying the torch for one another all these years later, adding another layer of complexity to Karen’s marriage. Similarly, we begin to understand from a line or two of dialogue at the wake that Sarah and Alex had an affair several years before, which put Sarah and Harold's marriage in jeopardy.

And Harold himself, the radical turned businessman, is shown to be the group's linchpin in a scene in which he informs his wife that everyone is going to stay at their huge vacation house for the weekend just as they encounter Nick, who’s stoned. The contrast sets up one of the film’s central preoccupations: loving, but faintly patriarchal, Harold is the one who's gone the most straight. He has accepted the bargain none of them thought they would, giving up his idealism for a shot at money and comfort.

One could go on and on. All of these delineations of character, conflict and theme are established in the film's first act, through a series of brief encounters which are almost entirely devoid of empty lines. It's a miracle of concision and a masterwork of ensemble storytelling.

The dialogue is, in short, great.

But it's not great in isolation, cannot be separated from the arcs of the characters who deliver it or the larger tales the film tells. Like virtually everything else in filmmaking, dialogue is a function of story, not the other way around.