Ordinary People (1980)

Ordinary People won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1980, famously beating out Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. Everyone knows that Raging Bull is one of the best films of the entire decade of the 1980s and probably should have won the Academy Award easily that year. But after watching Ordinary People, it's easy to see why this smaller, quieter film resonated so much with the voters. It's not on a par with Scorsese's film, certainly, but it's still an exceptional movie, perhaps even more so for being the directorial debut of Robert Redford. Few people can make a movie of this consistently high quality on their first try.

Ordinary People is a film about how we deal with loss. The Jarretts, an upper class family from the North Shore of Chicago, have recently experienced the death of their older son, Buck, in a boating accident that also involved his younger brother. The father, Calvin (played with great understatement by Donald Sutherland), is trying to hold his family together; he's the peacemaker, the intermediary. Beth, his wife (played by Mary Tyler Moore in a role that is a complete 180-degrees from Mary Richards), has seemingly closed herself off emotionally to both her husband and her remaining son; she was always closer to Buck when he was live, so his death makes her even more remote. The surviving son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton--more later), has been recently released after being institutionalized and is trying to reintegrate himself into his school and the community, and he's struggling to do so.

Hutton won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for this role, and he is amazing. He seems completely at ease in the part, able to demonstrate just how tightly Conrad has kept his feelings under wraps. However, in his scenes with his new psychiatrist (played with great humor by Judd Hirsch), he allows himself to reveal his frustrations and his fears and his desires. It's one of those performances that you watch and then wonder why the actor didn't have a bigger career. Was he just too difficult to pinpoint in terms of appropriate roles for his talent? (I think the same might have been true for Hutton's dad, the marvelous Jim Hutton, someone I always admired as an actor but who was also sadly overshadowed too many times.) Hutton is completely realistic as this teenage boy; he inhabits this role as he were truly having difficulty returning to "normal" society.

This film is quiet. Many scenes are slowly paced, and characters are often silent as they watch others or look out of windows or other unobtrusive behavior. It's really a film about how we don't communicate with each other, despite our obvious desire to change our behavior. We seem, the film suggests, to prefer silence. I remember being at my mother's house in one of the suburbs of Chicago when this film was being made and then seeing it later and realizing just how many people were like my own family. We don't always talk about how we really feel, and Ordinary People ably demonstrates the devastating consequences of such behavior.