Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A group of friends reconnects for the weekend after the attempted suicide of their friend Alex.
Ok, so it’s not The Big Chill, but About Alex is close, so close in fact that it may well just be The Millennial Big Chill. For those who enjoyed The Big Chill, the word “millennial” in front of it is not a detractor of the quality of the writing or the similar plot, but it does lead to some big shoes to fill in this timeshifted movie.
That is not helped any further by the similarities in the two plot lines. Both the suicide in The Big Chill and the attempted suicide in About Alex concern characters named Alex. There’s also more than a few direct shots of nostalgia either from music or a character actually saying “This is like an 80s movie.”
There’s also the talk of nostalgia by Josh – more on him and his dialogue later – and, of course, the dog that is found during an outing by a river is almost named Jeff Goldblum after one of the original stars of The Big Chill. If they were trying to distance themselves from the original, they tripped and fell down.
Despite my love for The Big Chill, I really liked About Alex, even more so the second time around. The first time around I wrote:
I like the film, but compared to the original, there is a reason The Big Chill worked better. And I’m sorry to say it is because Alex died.
Having Alex there is OK, but it ruins the therapy of the others dealing with his trauma, much less him dealing with his own. Also, having Alex there to talk to does mean that it takes a bit longer for the rest of the friends to talk about themselves and their own issues.
But culturally, this is The Big Chill for a different generation. A generation of Xanax and legal weed, anxiety and a recession, from which our characters graduate into a world with more student debt than any generation prior. The Big Chill was good for a few generations while About Alex will be good for more than one, but not nearly for as many.
About Alex (2014) is not The Big Chill (1983), except it absolutely is. For someone of my age who looked up to and overlapped with Generation X and the millennials that came next, I can see both movies as important. About Alex, however, is modern and dated in a way that makes it different. The Big Chill lacks the technology and cultural anxiety and cell phones and updated pressures on younger people, but they both get one thing absolutely correct: friendship is hard, and it’s important.
That Josh is the friend who has all the best lines may say more about me than the character or the film. I, for one, would be very interested in his dissertation about “the future of biography. How our ever-expanding digital footprint, emails, texts, tweets, will inform our understanding of history and ourselves.”
I tend to agree with him that many things have changed and not necessarily for the better. And I also agree with his exchange with Sarah about friendship (remember I said it was about friendship?).
Sarah: I like to see what my friends are up to. Big deal.
Josh: So what your news feed tells you that Isaac got a new pair of Italian loafers or Ben, Ben wrote a, a funny headline for the post, and that makes you feel like you still know somebody?
Sarah: Yeah, kind of, because that’s what people do now, Josh. People who care, at least.
Josh: Well, you know what, I’m sorry, but maybe I’d rather be in the fucking dark as to what people are up to than mistake some false level of intimacy for friendship.
Friends help. That’s the moral. And they help more when they are actually around. But you have to work at it or you end up reconnecting over something tragic or traumatic. It’s not just in the movies, either. It does take that much to bring us together in the real world.
I don’t think a relationship maintained only via social platforms is a relationship. It’s a fact that I met my wife on Twitter, but our relationship given a physical distance of thousands of miles was curated on the phone. We spoke to each other.
Perhaps that reliance on the phone for phone calls is a sign of the nostalgia that I have for the past. I generally find all the “social” platforms to be much more of a hindrance or a false positive facade to real connection than as a facilitator of, again similar to Josh’s sentiment mentioned previously.
Our friendships are vital, but they are often the first sacrifice along many roads.
The thing about Josh is that his character is not just the shit stirrer, so to speak. He’s also the voice of the modernization of The Big Chill mystique. With all the similarities, he’s the one who literally voices many of the modern differences within the circumstances of the two movies. He’s the one who doesn’t like the modern world and yet is attempting to write a dissertation about how it’s changing biography.
He’s the one who says, “The only thing I hate more than the present is nostalgia for the past.”
He’s the one who calls out the false intimacy of online relationships.
It all brings everything back to friendship, which I guess should qualify as genuine friendship, not pseudo-online friendship. Josh and I share the concept of friendship in that it’s not following along on Instagram or Facebook.
It’s reaching out by text, email, or phone. For those with more time or more room for effort, it’s a meal together or just some time in the same space with no digital interference at all.
I have a podcast that is about conversation, and I could and will easily argue that my connection with each individual guest during the recording is more concrete for that 90 minutes than most people’s friends list on any social platform you prefer to use.
That’s the overcurrent of About Alex. Utilizing technology for connection is more of a false flag, allowing the dopamine fix to confuse happiness of what people are willing to project with the dopamine that would be a real connection. But the undercurrent is about friendship and genuine connection.
And while I wrote it earlier in a flippant kind of a way, there are two statements that make this movie mean something.
Our friendships are vital, but they are often the first sacrifice along many roads. And, this movie is accurate as it uses a tragic plot device to bring estranged people and relationships back together.
At minimum, this is The Big Chill for another generation. With a little more credit, it should get you to rethink your parasocial social media friendships and reconnect through a phone call or a meal with friends you want to reconnect with.
Read the Secret File of technical information and quotes from About Alex.