A bunch of old friends turning up for a reunion in the country wasn’t exactly a fresh film topic in 1980 (it had been a stock theatre plot for years), but a lot more so than it is now, and audiences responded to the fact it was one of the first films to look at 60s student radicals ten years on.
Sayles understood drama instinctively, so why this is talky and not story heavy there's always something happening – one of the girls has a long running crush on one of the guys, a couple have just broken up and arrive separately, one girl is introducing her new boyfriend to the group, two outsider guys hit on the women. He puts in some action and movement where he can – a basketball game, jumping into a lake, chopping wood, an arrest, a visit to a theatre. This took a while to get going for me – lots of seemingly inane chatter to start off with, albeit with plenty of Sayles' wry humour, but it gets better as it goes along and keeps improving as we get the characters and start to care about them.
All the characters are three dimensional but I found the most vivid characters are the guys (I don’t know if this is Sayles or just me): the tormented drug counselor Jeff, the perennial slacker and aspiring singer JT, the local boy very unambitious Ron. There are lots of lovely moments: the monologue on progressive rock, recognising friends from vomiting, the casual introduction of their political history, friends saying they like people who they don’t have to explain votes too. It’s sexier than many Sayles scripts – there’s a hot scene where two old friends go for it in the living room (with another one trying to sleep nearby).Sayles steered away from sex in his later scripts.
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