Plot
Harold Cooper (Kevin Kline) is bathing his young son when his doctor wife Sarah (Glenn Close) receives a phone call at their Richmond home and learns that their friend Alex has committed suicide, slashing his wrists in the bathtub of their guest house in South Carolina.
At the funeral, Harold and Sarah are reunited with college friends from the University of Michigan in the 1960s. They include Sam (Tom Berenger), a famous television actor now living in Los Angeles; Meg (Mary Kay Place), an unhappy chain smoking former public defender who is now a real estate attorney in Atlanta, who wants a child; Michael (Jeff Goldblum), a sex-obsessed People journalist; Nick (William Hurt), a Vietnam veteran and former radio host who suffers from impotence; Karen (JoBeth Williams), a housewife from suburban Detroit who's unhappy in her marriage to her advertising executive husband Richard (Don Galloway), an outsider. Also present is Chloe (Meg Tilly), the much-younger girlfriend of Alex at the time of his suicide.
Everyone goes from the cemetery to Harold and Sarah's house, where they are invited to stay for the weekend. During the first night there, a bat flies into the attic while Meg and Nick are getting reacquainted. Sam later finds Nick watching television and they briefly talk about Karen. The two then go into the kitchen and find Richard, her husband, making a sandwich, and the three make small talk which turns into a discussion about responsibility and adulthood.
The next morning, Harold and Nick go jogging. Harold's successful company sells running shoes. Harold confides that Sarah and Alex had an affair five years earlier. Nick comforts Harold by saying, "She didn't marry Alex."
Richard returns home to look after his and Karen's kids, but she decides to stay for the weekend. Nick, Harold, Michael and Chloe go for a drive while Sam and Karen go shopping. Meg reveals to Sarah that she wants to have a child, and that she is going to ask Sam to be the father, knowing now that Nick can't.
Harold listens to Michael's plans to buy a nightclub. Chloe takes Nick to the abandoned house that she and Alex were going to renovate; she tells him that he reminds her of Alex, to which Nick replies, "I ain't him."
At dinner, Sarah starts tearing up over Alex as the group talks about him. Harold puts "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" by The Temptations on the stereo and everyone dances while cleaning up the dishes. While the others sit around and get high, Meg asks Sam to father her baby, but he declines.
The next morning, Nick, Sam, and Harold go jogging, and the subject of Alex's suicide comes up again. Harold's surprise arrives — sneakers for everyone to wear during the big Michigan football game. The group, minus Nick, watches the game on TV while Sarah tells Karen about her brief affair with Alex and how it affected their friendship negatively. She is subtly warning Karen to rethink her plans to have an affair with Sam.
During the game, Michael offers to father Meg's child, alluding to the fact that they had had sex many years ago during college. At halftime, everyone goes outside to play touch football. Nick returns with a cop following him. He said that Nick ran a red light and was belligerent but that he would drop the charges if Sam would hop into Nick's Porsche like his TV character, J.T. Lancer, always does. Sam's unsuccessful and hurts himself; the officer drops the charges anyway and apologizes to Harold.
Karen later tells Sam that she loves him, wants to leave Richard and live with Sam and her two sons. When they kiss, Sam pulls away and tells Karen to not leave Richard, as she will regret it in the long run. He confesses that it was "boredom" that caused his own marriage to fracture and he doesn't want her to make the same mistake. Karen feels misled and angrily storms into the house.
Harold is on the phone with his daughter, Molly, and lets Meg talk to her. Observing their interaction on the phone, Sarah decides to let Harold impregnate Meg, but does not tell him yet.
The group once again discusses Alex. Nick says, "Alex died for most of us a long time ago," but Sam disagrees and leaves. Karen follows him and the two have sex outside. Sarah tells Harold about Meg's situation while Chloe and Nick go to bed together, even though he warns her of his condition. Meg and Harold then have sex – she says "I feel like I got a great break on a used car" – while Michael and Sarah joke around and interview each other with a video camera.
In the morning while Karen is packing her clothes, she subtly tells Sam that she has decided to stay with Richard. At the breakfast table Harold reveals that Nick and Chloe will be staying in the guest house for a while, then Michael sarcastically states, "Sarah, Harold. We took a secret vote. We're not leaving. We're never leaving." They all laugh and "Joy to the World" plays as the credits roll.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)