ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Robert Redford

Cast: Timothy Hutton / Donald Sutherland / Mary Tyler Moore

Plot

Troubled by a tragedy from the past, the members of an otherwise normal suburban family struggle to cope with their loss and relate to one another.

What I Liked

So apparently there’s still anger among certain cinephiles that “Ordinary People” beat out “Raging Bull” for the Best Picture Oscar.  While Scorsese is my favorite director and “Raging Bull” is regarded as one of his undisputed masterpieces, I have to say, I do kind of get why “Ordinary People” was picked.  As a fan of Marty, DeNiro and boxing, the visual character study of Jake LaMotta will always be more entertaining for me, but “Raging Bull” relies so much on shock value and style that it can at times feel as overbearing and brutish as its subject.  Meanwhile, “Ordinary People” is a much more subtle film that is strongest in its moments of silence and simplicity.

To put it another way, “Ordinary People” was far less flashy than “Raging Bull” and dealt with some truths that many viewers might have still feel hit unnervingly close to home.  It is a film that deals largely with what goes unsaid, the conflict played out in frightened stares, nervous gestures, and uncomfortable silences.  That description might make it seem boring, but I personally could not stop watching the movie, thanks to a perfectly paced script with well-rendered, relatable characters.

The fact that every actor with a speaking part is perfectly cast and plays their role flawlessly certainly helps the film retain its intense emotional impact more than thirty years after its release.  In fact, to me, the great Oscar travesty that year was not that this movie beat out “Raging Bull” for Best Picture, but that Timothy Hutton was forced to settle for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.  Hutton’s character, the anxiety-ridden and depressed teenager Conrad Jarrett is absolutely the main character of the story and Hutton gets far more screen time than either of the more famous people who got top billing in the film (Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland).  So how exactly did Hutton get demoted to being a supporting actor in the eyes of the Academy?  It is really his career-making performance that is the crux of the film’s plot, conflict, and emotional resonance.

What I Didn’t Like

Particularly when viewed all these years later, with psychology and dysfunctional families very familiar themes in American pop culture, “Ordinary People” never feels particularly original, at least not on the surface.  Even with its title, the filmmakers rely on a movie convention that was already cliché by 1980: the secrets haunting a seemingly perfect suburban neighborhood/household and the myth of “normalcy.”  Charles Laughton, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kramer, Mike Nichols, and John Carpenter had all mined similar themes in various ways previously.  But none did so with the touching realism and absence of ego that director Robert Redford accomplishes here.  His movie is the epitome of substance over style.

Some of the scenes involving Conrad meeting his psychiatrist (played by Judd Hirsch) also now feel a bit silly, full of overacting and cliché confrontations that might have very well felt poignant back in 1980.  The prevalence of therapy as a plot device in film means that these scenes don’t feel as special today as they might have then.

Most Memorable Scene

Hutton’s lunch meeting with an old friend from the hospital has much of that unspoken conflict I mentioned earlier.  There’s a great deal that is revealed here about Conrad here without much being said.  Here are two old friends meeting one another again, separated by time and distance from where they had first come to know one another.  The circumstances of their pasts and their own personal problems prove too strong for either one of them to break through so that they can once again communicate with one another the way they used to.  This movie if filled with tragic failures to communicate, but this one will prove the most tragic of all.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5