Ordinary People (1980) Review

A teenager comes home from a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. His older brother drowned in a sailing accident. His father wants to talk about it, his mother will not, and the household operates on a set of arrangements nobody has ever stated.

The 7 is for a film that does one difficult thing extremely well, which is to dramatize a family that communicates entirely through what it declines to say. Almost nothing in it is a scene about the death and everything in it is about the death.

It is also a first film by an actor, is shot conservatively, and has no formal ambition of any kind, which is the whole basis of the argument against the Best Director result.

Judith Guest wrote the novel and it was her first, and Alvin Sargent adapted it and won for it. The screenplay is the film’s other genuine strength and is the element that makes the avoidance structure work.

The Family Speaks Around It

The film’s method is that nobody says the brother’s name for long stretches, and the audience assembles what happened from the arrangement of a house.

The breakfast scenes are the mechanism. Beth prepares food, Conrad does not eat, Calvin tries to mediate, and the same three positions recur across the film with almost no variation, which is what a household in this state really does.

The film also uses the empty chair without ever putting a camera on it. Buck’s place at the table is simply not laid, nobody refers to it, and the audience works out what the arrangement is from a place setting that does not exist.

The photograph sequence is the clearest single example. Calvin wants a picture of Beth and Conrad together, Beth resists, the camera never fires, and the argument is conducted entirely about photography.

It happens at Christmas, in front of relatives, which is what makes it unbearable. Calvin has an audience for the request, Beth has one for the refusal, and neither of them can say what the argument is really about.

That is a genuinely difficult thing to sustain for two hours and Redford sustains it. The film trusts the audience to read a conversation about a golf trip as a conversation about a dead child.

Mary Tyler Moore

Beth is the film’s achievement and the casting is the reason. Moore had spent two decades as the most likeable presence on American television and plays a woman who cannot love her surviving son.

What she does is refuse to justify it. The performance has no scene of breakdown, no explanation, and no moment where the audience is given a reason, and Beth’s coldness is presented as a fact about her and not as a symptom.

The best moment is small and awful. Conrad says something to her in a garden, she does not respond, and the film holds on her face doing nothing at all, which is worse than any available reaction.

The hospital scene late on is the other one. Conrad calls her, she is in a different state, and the film stages the whole conversation with her mostly silent while he tries to establish contact with somebody who has decided not to make any.

She was nominated and lost to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter. The performance is the film’s strongest element and the one least discussed, because the discussion of this film is entirely about what it beat.

Hutton and Hirsch

Timothy Hutton won Supporting Actor at twenty and is the lead of the film, which is a category decision the record simply contains.

The performance is unusually unguarded. Conrad is exhausted, is trying to appear recovered, laughs when he should not, and delivers almost everything in a flat register that breaks twice in two hours.

The two breaks are placed at the correct distance from each other. One in the middle, with Berger, and one near the end, and a film that let him break five times would have had no second one worth watching.

Judd Hirsch is the psychiatrist and the therapy scenes are the film’s most conventional material and its most effective. Berger is blunt, funny, swears, and refuses to be careful with him, which is a considerably better choice than the sympathetic listener the part invites.

The sessions are also scheduled at inconvenient hours and the film keeps that detail. Conrad has to get up early, resents it, and the resentment about the appointment is the first thing he is honest about.

The breakthrough scene is the one everybody remembers and it earns itself. Conrad states what he really feels guilty about, which is not surviving but letting go, and the film has withheld that specific fact for a hundred minutes.

The staging is a single room and a held camera, and Hutton delivers most of it without looking at Hirsch. The film had every reason to cut around that speech and holds on it instead.

Raging Bull

Best Picture and Best Director went to this film. Raging Bull was nominated in eight categories and won two, for De Niro and for Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing.

The argument is a formal one and it is not complicated. Scorsese’s film is one of the most technically radical American pictures ever made, in its sound design, its fight choreography, its black and white photography and its structure, and Redford’s is competently shot in a naturalistic style with no formal proposition at all.

The mechanism is also documented and unremarkable. Raging Bull is about a man who is violent toward his wife and brother and is given no redemption, was difficult to watch, and did not perform commercially. This film is about a family in Lake Forest, Illinois, is sympathetic to everybody in it, and made a great deal of money.

There is a further element worth stating. Redford was a major star and a new director, and the industry has a documented enthusiasm for that combination, and Scorsese had already made Taxi Driver and been passed over for it.

Raging Bull also lost Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress for Cathy Moriarty, Best Cinematography and Best Sound, which means it went eight for two on a night this film went six for four.

What the Result Cost

The film’s reputation has been damaged by winning in a way it would not have been by losing, which is the recurring observation on this page.

A competent, well-observed family drama that lost to Raging Bull would be remembered as a good film from a strong year. The same film having beaten it is remembered as an error, and nobody watches an error.

That is a genuine unfairness to everybody involved except the institution that made the choice. Hutton, Moore and Hirsch are all doing excellent work in a film that is now mostly a sentence in an argument.

Donald Sutherland was also not nominated, which is the year’s other oversight. Calvin is the character who changes most in the film, going from a man who believes the family can be repaired to one who understands it cannot, and Sutherland plays the whole arc in reaction.

Redford also never directed anything this good again, which is the other half of the picture. Quiz Show is close and A River Runs Through It is handsome, and neither has the discipline of the breakfast scenes in this one.

He also cast Elizabeth McGovern and Adam Baldwin in early parts and got very good work from both, and directing a first film with a cast of largely unfamiliar young actors is the sort of decision that indicates somebody who was paying attention.

Should you watch Ordinary People?

Yes, and watch it without the argument attached. A family that communicates entirely through what it declines to say, Mary Tyler Moore refusing to justify a woman who cannot love her son, a psychiatrist who will not be careful, and a reputation permanently damaged by a statue it should not have been given.

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