The Movies That Defined the Baby Boomer Generation

The Great Coolness (1983)

Just like their target audience, The Big Chill The ensemble, which includes Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Glenn Close, JoBeth Williams and Jeff Goldblum, was largely of a certain age by 1983. Whether they were in their early 40s or approaching 40, they all have fond memories of fighting for the cause in the 1960s high of the ’60s—an era when most of the characters in this film were friends. So now that they’re approaching middle age, their youthful idealism has given way to the petty practicalities of mortgages, home renovations, neighbor opinions and raising kids. And also their… whatever comes next.

The Big Chill is one of the most boomer-esque films ever made, because it’s about that generation who can enjoy their Marvin Gaye and the Rolling Stones soundtrack all they want, but can’t fight time. And after one of their own (Kevin Costner) commits suicide before the film begins, they’re forced to spend a weekend together before the funeral and consider what they’ve done with their lives since the ’60s, and what they can still do as that hill starts to slide down. The film was a monumental hit for director and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan. While he seemed to be asking his audience to take stock of their own mortality, in reality, most people seem to just groove to the soundtrack.

Peloton (1986)

There could have been more than one Vietnam film on this list. The deer hunter, Apocalypse Now, Coming homeand more, all made an impact. The one that felt most like it spoke for veterans in its day, rather than an artist trying to interpret their experience, was the first major Hollywood release to be produced by one of their own. Oliver Stone’s Peloton is a fictional passion play scaled up to the level of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Yet it remains rooted in the memories and experiences of writer-director Oliver Stone. He was a Yale student who dropped out to enlist in the U.S. Army, where he requested combat service in the war.

It’s an unusual path to Saigon, and one that’s mirrored by Peloton‘s Chris (Charlie Sheen), a rich kid who begins the film just off a plane bound for Southeast Asia, is a stark and heartfelt dramatization of the eclectic personalities, lifestyles, and ultimately factions that made up nearly every platoon of enlisted men and women. Tom Berenger’s Sgt. Barnes and Willem Dafoe’s Sgt. Elias are the thinly veiled devil and angel of American foreign policy on the shoulders of Chris and every other enlisted man. But no one is saved in this devastating portrait of the war that continues to shape 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 people of a certain age. He was, after all, steeped in the ideals and bitter ironies of the 1960s, both as an Ivy League intellectual and later as a Vietnam veteran. He also saw idealism give way to the “Me Decade” of the 1970s and later the greater excesses of capitalism in the 1980s. The son of a Wall Street stockbroker, he lived long enough to see Ronald Reagan declare that it was “morning in America.” Wall Street is a thinly veiled morality play in which Charlie Sheen’s fresh-faced young yuppie-in-training, Bud Fox, offers his soul to Lucifer in Braces, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).

The film is an unsubtle fable about the aspirations of young people seduced and corrupted by the lure 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 intended as a facade, as evidenced by the film’s ending with Gekko having Bud arrested for crimes he committed at Gekko’s behest. Tellingly, though, most moviegoers, Boomers and younger, were on board with Gekko’s (a)moral philosophy. He became the patron saint of business schools around the world, and even Stone began to feel sympathy for the devil given the direction of the disastrous Wall Street 2 Made 20 years later.