Best Picture: #53
Original Release Date: September 19, 1980
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 4 minutes
Director: Robert Redford
Quick Impressions:
My mother loved Ordinary People. She would often watch her favorite films again and again, turning them on for background noise while she did housework, and giving them her full attention only occasionally. She’d cycle through favorites. For months at a time, we’d be treated to repeat screenings of Death on the Nile, State Fair, another version of State Fair, The Lord of the Rings films, the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings films. In most cases, Mom’s taste differed dramatically from the Academy’s. But they agreed on this particular Best Picture winner. (I remember her telling me once, “Ordinary People isn’t like most Oscar movies. It’s good!”)
When I was young, she watched it frequently. (It must have been coming on HBO then. We didn’t have a VCR yet.) Then when I was a teenager, she began watching it again. There was a time when I would come home from high school and find Ordinary People playing in the background of our lives (almost eerily foreshadowing the psychiatric problems I myself was about to experience when I turned eighteen like Conrad). (If Mom had guessed that, she probably would have watched something else!)
So I grew up with a very positive impression of this film, but I’m not sure I ever sat down and paid attention to the entire thing from start to finish until I watched it with my daughter last week. More than just a well-made film, Ordinary People is a great movie. This gem that won Robert Redford Best Director isn’t just a work you admire. It’s a genuine pleasure to watch, engrossing, realistic, moving. Plus if you like crying—and let’s face it, catharsis brings pleasure—then is this ever the movie for you! Sometimes tearjerkers work too hard to make our faces leak, but you can feel good about crying over what happens here. The trauma in Conrad’s recent past is genuinely moving. (Under such circumstances, anyone would weep.) When drawing our tears, the movie never feels cheap or manipulative. You don’t regret crying later.
For what it’s worth, Judith Guest’s novel keeps making me cry, too. After my daughter and I enjoyed the movie so much, I decided to read the book. It’s written in present tense, which I usually find off-putting (or, at least, I claim to find it off-putting. I notice that it never actually puts me off. I make exceptions for any book I want to read), but its third omniscient narration gives us such rewarding insight into the characters. I’ve cried multiple times already, and I’m only in the middle of Chapter 10. (I try to have a novel with me in case there’s downtime during the day, but there usually isn’t much, so I don’t get through anything very fast.)
The Plot:
The Jarretts used to be a happy family. (Didn’t they?) But ever since Buck drowned in a tragic accident, nothing has been the same. Eighteen-year-old Conrad misses his brother, can’t connect with his mother, and wishes his worried father would stop asking him questions. Just because he attempted suicide once doesn’t mean he will do it again. He’s out of the hospital now, back in school, back on the swim team. Nothing’s wrong now. (Is it?) Everything’s okay again. (Right?) So why doesn’t it feel okay? At his father’s urging and to his mother’s dismay, Conrad begins seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Berger. He doesn’t want to go. Can therapy actually help him? Can anything? I mean, nothing’s wrong, anyway. (Is it?) But why can’t he sleep? And why can’t he talk to his mother? Sometimes Conrad misses the hospital. Life was less complicated there.
The Good:
When I was a teenager, I enjoyed the concept of this movie because for a while there, I flirted with the idea of becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist myself. I find people fascinating. (That makes me sound like a serial killer.) (Well, I’m imagining myself as Hannibal Lecter. He is a psychiatrist, actually, so I feel better.) (I’m probably just thinking of him because I’ve been enjoying Anthony Hopkins’s TikToks, unknown to me before his recent Oscar win.)
Where was I? Oh yes, I’m not a serial killer, but as a teen, I really enjoyed movies featuring therapy sessions that included dramatic discoveries and breakthroughs, like the mini-series Sybil, Marnie, Dead Again (though, admittedly, that one’s a bit complicated). So, of course, I loved the scenes featuring Judd Hirsch’s Dr. Berger coaxing painful recollections from Timothy Hutton’s Conrad. These scenes are still pretty powerful, especially the last one, when something important seems to click into place for Conrad.
And Timothy Hutton’s Oscar-winning performance could hardly be better. (He won Best Supporting Actor when he’s clearly the lead character, but that happens all the time.) The performance has aged exceptionally well, I think. This film came out about forty years ago, yet Hutton’s portrayal of Conrad’s torment still works. Nothing looks unintentionally comical or clumsily exaggerated (which sometimes happens with portrayals of mental illness after the passage of time).
I also came out about forty years ago, and find it alarming how young Hutton looks here, how much older he appears in The Haunting of Hill House. It’s quite sobering to realize how long ago 1980 was. But the world Conrad inhabits still feels totally accessible. Even my daughter found it realistic and compelling, probably because she loves so many 80s movies (and 80s nostalgia shows like Stranger Things) that 80s teen culture looks totally normal to her. But the point is, Hutton’s performance holds up. Even now, his Conrad is relatable and sympathetic. (Of course, it’s easy for me to sympathize with him. I went through something so similar myself, though I didn’t lose a sibling, and my mother was much more demonstrative than Mary Tyler Moore’s Beth.)
What surprised me on this watch was how fascinating I found the character dynamics in the rest of the film. As a kid, the therapy scenes made this movie for me. This time, they were the least interesting part. (And they’re still good. The whole movie is interesting.)
Never before was I so interested in Conrad’s parents, Beth and Calvin. Well, I was always interested in Beth. As a child, I once asked my mother why everything was so tense between Beth and Conrad. And she explained that Beth had favored her other son, that she would have preferred that he had lived, and that she resents Conrad for living. I believed her because she was the one who had seen the movie seventy thousand times.
But watching now as an adult, I have a completely different take on Beth. I don’t think that’s an accurate reading of her at all. Certainly it’s not charitable. (I’m not saying my mom was wrong. She may have been simplifying for me.) Mary Tyler Moore is Oscar worthy in this role. (She was nominated but didn’t win.) She’s certainly playing against type, radically different here than she is in anything else. Poor Beth. Conrad and his father benefit from seeing Dr. Berger, but if you ask me, the one most desperately in need of therapy is Beth. And she doesn’t believe in therapy. It’s not because she’s contrary; it’s because she’s trapped by rules drilled into her head since birth. She was raised a certain way, and in the wake of horrific tragedy, the script she has always relied on to cope with life is suddenly failing her. And she simply doesn’t know what to do. So she tries to go through the motions of life, pretending everything is fine. To be fair, the “fake it till you make it” approach sometimes works. But I think she’ll need something more, and in the meantime, she’s destroying her relationship with Conrad and alienating her husband (and the audience).
Beth presses her husband to take her away on vacation all the time not because she’s vapid and selfish but because that’s her way of saying, “I need help. I am not okay. Our life here is not working for me.” It’s the only way she can say it. Going away on vacation is socially acceptable according to the life rules she has always followed. Seeing a psychiatrist is not. (I doubt that going away will help her much in the long run since she seems to be seeking an escape from reality through a change of venue. She may be disappointed to get to her vacation destination and discover that she hasn’t managed to run away from her grief.)
When asked about her feelings, Beth falls back on a familiar script, saying things like, “Of course, a mother loves her son,” and “I feel the way I’ve always felt about you.” I think that’s because she doesn’t know how she feels. She’s depressed. Her feelings aren’t working properly, but intellectually, she knows she loves her son and her husband, even if she may feel nothing at all. I think we should take her at her word. Beth does love Conrad. But her emotions are betraying her right now. She has never learned how to express or even process her feelings. (In fact, she has learned that she shouldn’t try.) Something is wrong now, and she doesn’t have the tools even to begin to address it.
She is terribly cold to Conrad. I think that’s happening for two reasons. 1) She can’t bear the loss of her son, and the presence of her other son forces her to think of herself as a mother and to remember what she has lost. 2) Conrad wants love and shows of feeling from her. She’s overwhelmed by her grief and probably clinically depressed. It feels as if he’s always demanding something she can’t give him. Mothers with postpartum depression sometimes appear not to love their children, too. This is not because they don’t love their children. It’s because something is wrong with their brain at the moment. Plus, Beth isn’t always cold to Conrad. She starts passionate fights with him all the time. Perhaps that’s the best she can do to show she cares. He demands emotion. Rage is the only emotion she can manage.
I feel terribly sorry for her. The scene in which she breaks a plate in the kitchen (just before her mother comes in to give her oh-so-helpful advice about how her son shouldn’t be mentally ill) reminds me so much of my own mother. I remember her feelings of inadequacy and helplessness when she was caring for my grandma who was suffering increasingly from dementia and limited mobility. One night Mom was prepping baked potatoes with a paring knife and accidentally plunged the knife deep into the back of her other hand. Beth breaking the plate and then fixating miserably on saving it reminded me so much of that moment.
Obviously this is quite different from the sunny, charming Mary Tyler Moore we’re used to seeing, the one who can turn the world on with her smile. Does Beth often seem unpleasant when she’s interacting with her husband and her son? Yes. Is this because she’s a horrible person? I don’t see why we should assume that. I think she’s grieving and depressed right now, and that she’s repressed and struggling with OCD all the time. There’s much more to the character than I imagined as a child (when I was only half watching).
What surprised me most this watch was that Calvin Jarett, Beth’s husband and Conrad’s father, suddenly became my favorite character. I never found him so interesting in the past. In fact, I don’t remember giving him much thought before at all. (But remember, the movie was like background noise at my house for a while, so I wasn’t necessarily paying close attention.) He’s so easy to sympathize with, though. Donald Sutherland makes him look so helpless (interesting, since I usually like Sutherland best when he’s playing sinister or mysterious characters). How can you not feel for Cal? He seems to be suffering from impostor syndrome about his entire life. He’s got this running inner monologue full of self-interrogation and reproach. He can’t seem to feel good about believing that he’s any of the things that he is. He questions his worth as a father, a husband, a socialite, a man in his profession. (He doesn’t seem uncertain about his worth at performing his job, so much as vaguely troubled that he isn’t like the other guys at the office in mindset.)
Beth’s coldness toward Conrad makes Calvin’s overcompensation hard to resist. Maybe he doesn’t know what questions to ask his son or what to do to help him, but he’s trying so hard! Calvin seems like the type who has always felt insecure, but this relentless self-scrutiny seems to have started when Buck died and worsened with Conrad’s suicide attempt. What kind of a father is he if he can’t even keep his sons safe? Sutherland’s performance is very good, and, of course, it helps that I personally identify with feelings like this. When something goes wrong with one of my kids, I panic. You write something, and it’s written. You read something, and it’s read. You give birth to someone, and who knows what might happen! While struggling with his own grief, Calvin feels like it’s his job to be the mediator between his wife and son. (It doesn’t help that Beth seems to pressure him to choose between them.) Sutherland conveys the character’s torment very well.
Ordinary People also gives us plenty of famous faces to watch out for in supporting roles (people we’re used to seeing on TV)—Elizabeth McGovern, Adam Baldwin, and Dinah Manoff. McGovern is so charming here, and Manoff makes her one big scene count.
The world the Jarrett family inhabits—the houses, the restaurants, and particularly the high school—feels not only real and compelling but uncannily immersive. At many moments, the atmosphere screams early 1980s so loudly that the movie almost looks like a present-day film set in the 1980s, intentionally highlighting early 80s culture and style for nostalgia. I like the use of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, too. It seems like the perfect music to accompany the story (maybe just because it reminds me of high school since it was one of our musical selections for Academic Decathlon one year).
Visually the movie appeals to me, too. We get a lot of emphasis on characters’ eyes, also the color blue in stark contrast to a more autumnal palette of shades of near brown. I wasn’t watching with color in mind, but I’d like to revisit the film while focused on color. Sutherland’s anguished blue eyes (often watering with emotion) stick in my mind. I also remember the brown eyes of Moore, so often frantic. As I recall, most of the movie’s color palette is either various shades of brown (including some muted reds and burnt oranges) and then shocking bursts of blue (Sutherland’s eyes, the swimming pool, the McDonalds hat).
While we watched, my daughter observed that Conrad’s conversations with Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch) had a calming affect on her, in stark contrast to the stress-inducing chatter of the school and the various social gatherings. Her comments made me appreciate how strongly the film emphasizes that the type of talk going on in Berger’s office is different. There, conversation is productive, helpful. What’s said is true. The color palette of the office is also quite muted compared to that used in the other scenes of the film. The doctor’s office is a special place, something sacred and crucial is going on in there.
Best Scene:
The final time Conrad recalls the incident with Buck in Berger’s office is extremely powerful. It’s the part of the movie I always loved as a child.
An earlier moment helps to make this one possible. On this viewing of the film, the scene with Karen (Dinah Manoff) in the diner made my stomach clinch. I think what this foreshadows seems clear enough even if you haven’t seen the movie before. My daughter also found the moment sad and uncomfortable, inducing uneasiness and a growing feeling that what ultimately does happen will.
I also think the film’s ending is pretty perfect.
Best Action Sequence:
Christmas is hard to endure yet strangely satisfying to watch. We get to feel the tension, then see it break.
Best Scene Visually:
I like Beth’s reaction to her last conversation with Calvin, but I’m only calling it a visually appealing scene because there’s no dialogue, and we must watch Moore’s face. In terms of visuals, the film’s color palette stands out to me more than any single image.
I suppose if I had to name one image that I strongly associate with Ordinary People, it would be the Jarretts’ unintentionally depressing dinner table, where Conrad and his mother face off with Calvin sitting awkwardly between them and an entire side of the table pointedly empty.
The Negatives:
When I was young, the scenes in Dr. Berger’s office excited me so much. (I would be doing something else entirely, and then I would suddenly pay attention during these scenes only.) They’re still fantastic scenes, and, of course, the catalyst of all this family misery is revealed during these conversations with Dr. Berger. But here’s the thing. Probably in part because so many movies have modeled their therapy scenes on the ones in Ordinary People, these moments now seem like some of the least inspired and most predictable to me.
Of course, this may be a problem with me, not with the movie. Obviously the only part of the movie you really paid attention to when watching it countless times will seem more predictable than the rest. And here’s another thing that I think is a problem with me. This time through, I wanted to know more about the psychiatrist. Everyone else in the entire movie is offered up in all their messy humanity for us to try to understand, but because we only see him in a professional capacity, Dr. Berger remains a tough nut to crack. There’s nothing wrong with Hirsch’s Oscar nominated performance (though I like him slightly better as David’s scenery chewing dad in Independence Day), but I wish we knew more about the man. Of course, part of the reason therapy with him is helpful is his lack of personal involvement in Conrad’s life. There are no stakes when talking to the doctor, so Conrad can be honest, and he can focus on addressing his own needs rather than becoming caught up in the needs and expectations of his therapist. I get how it works. I just like Judd Hirsch, and I’d like to learn more about his character. Plus it hardly seems fair that the audience is encouraged to think about the emotions of all the characters but one. (The book gives us a little more insight, though.)
Overall:
Ordinary People draws you in immediately. Over forty years after its premiere, it still feels relatable and engaging. Everyone in the cast gives a strong performance, no doubt helped along by Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning direction and the excellent material, adapted from an equally compelling novel by Judith Guest. I can see why my mother loved this movie. I could watch it again any time.