The Big Chill (1983)
Like their target audience, The Big Chill ensemble, which includes Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Glenn Close, JoBeth Williams, and Jeff Goldblum, had mostly reached a certain age by 1983. Either in their early 40s, or about to turn it, they all have fond memories of fighting the good fight during the heady 1960s: it’s also the era where most of the characters in this film were friends. So, as they approach middle age, their youthful idealism has given way to small-minded practicalities like mortgages, home renovations, neighbors’ opinions, and raising children. Theirs also… what comes next.
The Big Chill is one of the most Boomer-y movies to ever boom, because it is about that exact generation who can bask in their Marvin Gaye and the Rolling Stones soundtrack all they want, but they can’t fight time. And after one of their own (Kevin Costner) kills himself before the movie starts, they’re forced to spend a weekend together for the funeral and consider what they’ve done with their lives since the ‘60s, and what they can still do as that hill starts sloping downward. The movie was a monumental hit for director and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan. Albeit he seemed to want to ask his audience to take stock of their mortality; in reality, it seems most folks preferred just grooving to the soundtrack.
Platoon (1986)
There could have been more than one Vietnam movie on this list. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, and more all made an impact. However, the one that felt the most in its day like it spoke for veterans, as opposed to an artist trying to interpret their experience, was the first major Hollywood release produced by one of their own. Oliver Stone’s Platoon is a fictional passion play heightened to the level of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Even so, it remains grounded in the memories and experiences of writer-director Oliver Stone. He was a Yale undergraduate who dropped out so he could enlist into the U.S. Army—where he requested combat duty in the war.
It’s an unusual path to Saigon, and one echoed by Platoon’s Chris (Charlie Sheen), a rich kid who begins the movie when he’s fresh off the plane to Southeast Asia. Through his point-of-view we see a grim and earnest dramatization of the eclectic personalities, lifestyles, and finally factions that composed almost any platoon of conscripts and enlisted men. Tom Berenger’s Sgt. Barnes and Willem Dafoe’s Sgt. Elias are the thinly veiled devil and angel of American foreign policy on Chris and every other grunt’s shoulders. But no one finds salvation in this devastating portrait of the war that still shapes competing worldviews.
Wall Street (1987)
In the mid to late 1980s, Oliver Stone had his finger on the pulse of the American psyche, or at least the psyche of those of a certain age. After all, he was immersed into the ideals and bitter ironies of the 1960s, both as an Ivy League intellectual and then a Vietnam veteran. He also saw how idealism gave way to the “Me Decade” of the 1970s and later the greater excesses of 1980s capitalism unbound. The son of a Wall Street stockbroker lived long enough to see Ronald Reagan declare it’s “morning in America.” Wall Street is thus a barely disguised morality play where Charlie Sheen’s fresh-faced Gen X yuppie-in-training, Bud Fox, offers his soul to Lucifer-in-Suspenders, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).
The movie is an unsubtle fable about the aspirations of youth being seduced and corrupted by the allure of corporate America, complete with one of the most popular Boomer actors uttering the line “greed is good.” Of course Gekko’s sales pitch about the virtues of selfishness was supposed to be a front, as exposed by a movie that ends with Gekko getting Bud nabbed for crimes he committed at Gekko’s urging. However, it’s telling that most moviegoers, be they Boomers or younger, walked away agreeing with Gekko’s (a)moral philosophy. He became the patron saint of business schools everywhere, and even Stone came around to sympathizing with the devil considering the direction of the disastrous Wall Street 2 made 20 years later.