Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)

Director: John Sayles                              Writer: John Sayles
Music: Mason Daring                              Cinematography: Austin De Besche
Starring: Bruce MacDonald, Maggie Renzi, David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp

I had heard about this film for decades, beginning with Siskel and Ebert’s rant when The Big Chill came out and how much better this film was. It’s not. I can see the merits of the film, and understand why people like it, but ultimately it doesn’t hold up as a work of art for me. It’s like My Dinner with Andre, only with a dozen boring conversations instead of just one. This is the directorial debut of John Sayles, whose work I haven’t really been motivated to explore. Return of the Secaucus Seven is a small, independent film that has been lovingly restored but still shows its humble beginnings. I’ve written on many occasions that just because a film did something first, doesn’t mean that it is deserving of praise despite its flaws. It is still a flawed film, and Kasdan’s remake is still a better film.

The title of the film is not the setting, and the story takes place in New Hampshire. A group of college friends who were arrested in Secaucus while heading to a protest in Washington D.C. ten years earlier, are reuniting at the home of Bruce MacDonald and Maggie Renzi. Interestingly, none of the actual seven, apart from Adam LeFevre, became actors of any significance. The gas station attendant in town who went to high school with some of them is David Strathairn, who has had a slow but steady climb into stardom, and the straight-laced boyfriend of Jean Passanante is Gordon Clapp, best known for his work on NYPD Blue. Sayles himself plays another high school grad who got married and has three small children. Most of the first half of the film is spent establishing which of the group used to be sleeping with whom, for Clapp’s and the audience’s benefit. The rest is an awkward attempt at recreating banal sounding dialogue that feels incredibly forced.

For me, this is the biggest failure of the film. In attempting to be painfully realistic with his dialogue, Sayles has inadvertently done the opposite. There is a certain artistic quality that must be present in a screenplay that makes it worth watching. The kind of gossip and tedious details of life that might be interesting to those characters themselves, seems maddeningly pointless to outsiders. This is the strength of The Big Chill. First, Kasdan creates a far more compelling reason for the reunion: the death of one of their members. Secondly, the characters are differentiated into recognizably types: TV star, business owner, doctor, lawyer, writer, housewife, etc. In this there is something to anchor each character, and the death of the other focuses their conversations. In Sayles’ film it is all too random, too specific to the characters and, at the end of the day, too phony because of it.

Another issue is, of course, the acting. I understand that this is a small film, with relatively unknown actors. Fine, but all that serves to do is make the stilted dialogue that much worse. Technically, it’s not a poorly made film. Sayles clearly has some talent. A lot of the scenes, like the skinny-dipping, the basketball, and the bar scenes are well done, but the greatest frame in the world can’t make a bad picture any better. At the end of the day Return of the Secaucus Seven is what it is, a small film by a beginner who was learning his craft. To make it any more than that does not only a disservice to the film itself, but is an insult to the greater works to come. The film has interest as a curiosity, but is not something I’ll ever return to for entertainment.