Tom Berenger wears an unidentified watch

Tom Berenger opens a bottle in the kitchen at night, and the watch on his wrist catches the light — steel, with a distinctive blue-green dial. It is one of the clearer watch shots in Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 ensemble drama The Big Chill, where seven college friends reunite for a weekend after the funeral of the eighth. Berenger plays Sam Weber, a TV actor who got famous and feels guilty about it. The role is not far from what Berenger was actually doing at the time — he was on the edge of stardom himself, two years before Platoon made him a household name.

Sam's watch is unidentified, but the steel case and colored dial suggest something more expensive than what a college-era idealist would have chosen. That is probably the point. Sam has money now, and the watch, however understated, is evidence of a life that went in a direction his younger self would not have predicted. Kasdan's film is about that gap — the distance between who people planned to be at twenty and who they are at thirty-five.