DVD Watch

Return of the Secaucus 7

Sex, drugs, and not so much rock & roll. Without Motown montages and suburbanites breaking spontaneously into song during kitchen chores, Return of the Secaucus 7, John Sayles’ virgin directorial effort, is not quite The Big Chill. Included among this fall’s syllabus of Sayles releases, like Casa de los Babys on the big screen and other new DVD issues of Sayles’ earliest films (like The Brother From Another Planet), this first film gives great opportunity to survey the professional development of the maverick lone star director known for playing Hollywood against itself. Released theatrically in 1980, Secaucus 7‘s MGM DVD is complete with commentary by Sayles and actress/producer/partner Maggie Renzi, making it fine introductory material for “Sayles 101,” not only for the film’s point on the time line, but also for its value as a compare-and-contrast exercise. Existing in a sort of parallel indie universe against larger Hollywood ensemble nostalgia fests, Secaucus 7 is reflection without saccharine, mingling of backstory and present without obviously diagrammed turning points, and sexual-tension-building aided not by the tools of gratuitously exposed and exercised female nether regions, but male ones, instead (watch out for those balletic swan dives, ladies). Belly-flopping nakedness and all, Sayles’ work gets attention because it addresses human-relationship realism in all of its ugly, painful splat. Centered around the reunion of several friends and former Sixties activists at a couple’s house in Vermont, Secaucus 7 is about being depressed for that week after you hit 30. Nobody has become who she expected to become after the gay old days spent marching in picket lines for better futures. A decade later, an aspiring Cornell country singer still sings the same off-key fumbling tune, pot continues to make us feel better, and romantic relationships have disintegrated into stale fodder for indiscriminate hook-ups on uncomfortable, hardwood floors. But amid the downward mobility, these old pals remain unified in their questioning of authority, and they are not quiet about it. We can always expect a Sayles film to get political, and in Secaucus 7 we see that Sayles started early. If some of the acting seems stilted, however, we must be forgiving, considering that this $40,000 seminal effort was the first film for not only the director but also the entire cast, who met doing college theatre in New Hampshire. Many of the actors have followed Sayles in some capacity, from his theatre beginnings and throughout his career, as resourceful, high-budget, often uncredited, screenwriter by day (Apollo 13, The Alamo) and low-budget, auteur director by night, weekend, and holiday. The theatre’s influence toward unity of time and place helps us identify with the characters as they flout such norms as a woman’s pressure to procreate and a man’s burden to bring home the bacon. When the cast loafs around the house, drinking beer over a game of Clue, we might as well be joining in, ranting about Jimmy Carter and his true nonleftist colors with the best of ’em. If nothing else, it could beat dancing around a dishwasher with Jeff Goldblum.

This article appears in October 10 • 2003.