Maura: What's a reunion without a little melodrama?
Return of the Secaucus Seven is a 1980 independent dramedy film that marked the directorial debut of John Sayles.
A group of old college friends and former 1960s radicals gather together for a weekend reunion at the New Hampshire house of Mike Donnelly (Bruce MacDonald), a history teacher, and Katie Spiriano (Maggie Renzi), an English teacher. The visitors include Irene Rosenblum (Jean Passanante), who works as a speechwriter for a U.S. Senator, along with her current boyfriend Chip Hollister (Gordon Clapp); J.T. (Adam LeFevre), who's trying to make it as a folk singer; Frances Carlson (Maggie Cousineau), a doctor; Maura Tolliver (Karen Trott), who teaches theater to children; and Jeff Andrews (Mark Arnott), a drug counselor, who Maura has just broken up with after a five-year relationship. Over the course of the weekend, the friends hang out, play games, and reminisce about their past.
The film was a modest hit (making $2 million on a budget of $60,000), and was part of the independent film movement that gathered steam in the 1980s before exploding in the 1990s. It also paved the way for other movies about old friends getting together for a weekend, particularly The Big Chill, although Sayles always took pains to point out that the two films were quite different from each other.note In 1997, the film was added to the National Film Registry for its historic merits.
Return of the Secaucus Seven provides examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Norman, whom the friends meet at the police station. He admits he's been like this since the shoe factory he worked at closed down. He also turns out to be a Chekhov's Gunman, as he's the one who was responsible for killing the deer the friends were arrested for.
- Answer Cut: Done twice:
- First, when Katie picks up Maura at the bus stop, Irene asks, "Is J.T. here?" In the next shot, we see Maura and J.T. hugging each other at Mike and Katie's house.
- The second time comes when Mike is explaining to Chip how all of the friends got to know each other in the past, mentioning Maura's ex Jeff, who isn't there. Chip then asks, "But who's Jeff?" Cut to Jeff greeting Ron at the gas station.
- Audience Surrogate: Since Chip is the only outsider of the group, he gets to be the one who asks questions about everyone's history, and Irene, Frances and Mike do their best to answer.
- Creator Cameo: Sayles shows up in a couple of scenes as a hotel clerk who's friends with the seven.
- Deadpan Snarker:
- Katie definitely is an example of this, especially when she's talking about Lacey, Mike's ex-girlfriend and the one they're going to see in a play later (see Stylistic Suck below). When one of the friends brings up the last time Lacey promised "free entertainment", Katie points out, "It was free."
- J.T. also has shades of this; when he meets a female rock critic who says she's a fan of Progressive Rock, he cracks, "Right - Heavy Metal goes to college."
- Did the Earth Move for You, Too?: Discussed; when Katie and Mike hear Chip and Irene upstairs, Katie cracks, "I guess the earth moved for Irene."
- Dramatic Irony: The first night, when Katie has to go to the bathroom, she goes out, only to come back to tell Mike she sees two people having sex. They assume it's Frances and J.T. (since Frances has had feelings for J.T. and J.T. Really Gets Around), when we actually know it's J.T. and Maura.
- The Easy Way or the Hard Way: Discussed in a variant on this trope; when Irene (who, along with Chip, has the best job of the group) offers to invest in J.T.'s career so he can go out to Los Angeles and make it as a singer/songwriter, J.T. refuses the money, and tells her he doesn't want to be one of those people who is hanging on with their friends because he knows he can count on them to lend him money. J.T. tells Irene he'd rather make it as a singer the hard way or not at all, which she accepts, especially when he admits if he doesn't make it, he'll hit Irene up for a job.
- Flipping the Bird: Done twice. First, when J.T. is pretending to be a student in Mike's class, he flips Mike off, which Mike admits is indicative of his students. Then, near the end, when Frances comes back to the house after spending the night in a hotel with Ron, the others sing to her, "Hey There", and she jokingly flips them off.
- Hangover Sensitivity: Almost everyone (especially Katie) is hungover and tired on their last morning together, except for Mike (who's cooking breakfast) and Chip (the only one eating). Discussed later by Katie and Frances; when Katie remembers how she used to be able to get stoned all the time and feel fine the next day, Frances points out she could never handle alcohol, and Katie reluctantly agrees.
- Hidden Depths: Chip may seem like a square at first, but he's willing to make fun of his boss, and when the others bring up marijuana while they're having lunch, he's the one who mentions the joints he and Irene have.
- Ironic Echo Cut: When Katie tells Mike how she saw J.T. and Maura having sex (see Dramatic Irony above) and then they hear Chip and Irene having sex in the bedroom above, Mike jokes, "Jesus, what did you put in the food?" Cut to Mike making everyone breakfast the next day.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jeff can come off as abrasive (especially when he's arguing with Maura and Chip), and he's carrying around heroin, which could have gotten them in real trouble when they were arrested. However, he treats everyone else well - he even makes up with J.T. after J.T. admits he slept with Maura - he lets Maura go without a fuss (and there's an indication they'll be Better as Friends), and he even admits Chip is a good guy, even if he disagrees with him (and the senator Chip works for).
- Jump Cut: A series of shots showing the men dunking a basketball in a seven-foot rim.
- Long List: Jeff at the police station gives a long list of all of the times he was arrested in the past. When Maura gives her name, she adds her arrest record is the same as Jeff's except for when they got separated in D.C.
- Male Frontal Nudity: At one point, the friends go swimming, and the male friends all go Skinny Dipping; when they're drying off, they pose nude on the rocks.
Word of God says this was a deliberate attempt to subvert the usual Ms. Fanservice tropes usually done with this kind of sequence. - Non-Answer: Lampshaded by Chip and Irene when they're talking about the senator they work for. Chip pretends to be the senator and Irene pretends to be interviewing him, and she asks him for a position on the tomato, which Chip does his best not to take a position on, going so far as to bring up John F. Kennedy in order to avoid the subject. Chip and Irene then mention how they had to write several drafts of a speech on the legalization of marijuana, and the senator only approved of the draft where he was seen to take no position on it whatsoever.
- Percussive Therapy: After Jeff finds out J.T. slept with Maura, they play basketball with the other men in the group, and Jeff ends up pushing J.T. into the pole at one point. Jeff apologizes, and says he didn't mean to do it, but admits there might have been something unconscious about it.
- Also, near the end of the film, Jeff chops a bunch of wood, partly to pay back Mike and Katie for their kindness, but mostly to work off his anger at the breakup of his relationship with Maura.
- Photo Montage: The movie opens with mug shot-type photos of the Secaucus seven, making the film seem like it's going to be a crime movie, rather than the character-driven Slice of Life Dramedy it turns out to be.
- Shout-Out:
- At one point, as a joke, Katie and Mike refer to each other as June and Ward.
- Frances, Irene, Katie and Maura are playing Clue at one point.
- The groups the female rock critic mentions as being examples of Progressive Rock include Yes, Rush, and King Crimson.
- When J.T. and Mike are talking about how they became known as the Secaucus Seven (see Title Drop below), they tell Chip everyone was acting out of something from Salt of the Earth (and Irene, Katie and Maura do the chant, "We want the formula" over and over).
- Jeff and J.T. joke about threatening Chip if he hurts Irene by breaking his thumbs, as in The Hustler (1961).
- Stylistic Suck: The Restoration Comedy the friends all go to see that features Lacey. When the others try to think of excuses not to go backstage, since they all hated the play, Chip mentions he liked it, to which Katie snorts, "Then you be the first one (to go backstage)".
- Title Drop: When everyone except Frances is at the police station, after being arrested, J.T. points out they have almost all of the Secaucus Seven. He and Mike explain to chip how the seven of them had driven down to D.C. to participate in an anti-war protest, but when they stopped off in Secaucus to get gas, they were arrested for drug possession.
- Toilet Humor: The first morning together, as Mike is making breakfast, J.T. talks about how much chili he's had while he's been on the road hitchhiking, and the others join in to make fart-related jokes, which puts Chip off of eating.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: On their last night together, Jeff and J.T. are talking when they hear someone vomit upstairs. After a few minutes of guessing, they figure out it's Maura.
- We ARE Struggling Together: Chip and Jeff end up getting into an argument at the bar they all go about whether it's better to work within the system (Chip's view) or if the system is too corrupt and whether working within it is automatically selling out (Jeff's view).
