Ordinary People (1980) Review
7/10
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 won’t, and the household works on a set of arrangements nobody has ever stated.
This film disturbs me more than its quiet surface suggests it should. I admire it, I think Redford’s Best Director win is indefensible, and I can hold both of those opinions at once without any trouble.
The 7 is for a film that does one difficult thing extremely well. It dramatizes 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’s also a first film by an actor, is shot conservatively, and has no formal ambition of any kind. That’s 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 real 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 doesn’t eat, Calvin tries to mediate, and the same three positions recur across the film with almost no variation. That’s 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 doesn’t 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. That’s 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 Christmas scene is almost too painful for me to sit through. Nobody raises a voice, and a whole marriage comes apart over a camera. It’s the film’s plain style working in its favor, because Redford has the sense to point the camera at the family and stay out of the way. That’s a 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.
A family that can’t discuss something will discuss everything else, and the substitute subject is the scene. Breakfast, a photograph, a golf trip. The rule is that the reader must know what’s being avoided. Avoidance without knowledge is just small talk. Repeat the same configuration with almost no variation. Three people in the same positions at the same table is what the state of the household looks like from inside. Let one character keep trying to mediate. Calvin’s failure is what shows that the other two aren’t going to move.
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 can’t 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 doesn’t respond, and the film holds on her face doing nothing at all. That blank face chills me more than any reaction she could have chosen, and it’s the performance I’d send people to this film for.
The hospital scene late on is the other one. Conrad calls her, she’s 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. That’s a category decision the record simply contains. The performance is unusually unguarded. Conrad is exhausted, is trying to appear recovered, laughs when he shouldn’t, and delivers almost everything in a flat tone 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. That’s 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’s honest about.
The breakthrough scene is the one everybody remembers and it deserves to be. Conrad states what he really feels guilty about. That isn’t surviving but letting go, and the film has withheld that 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. Hutton not looking at Hirsch, and Redford refusing to cut away, is the kind of restraint I wish more directors had. It’s the scene where I stop holding the film’s Oscar against it.
Withhold the guilt instead of the event. The audience knows the brother drowned within ten minutes, and what they don’t know for a hundred is exactly what Conrad thinks he did. The event is information and the guilt is the story.
Make the therapist difficult. A sympathetic listener produces no scenes, and somebody who’s blunt and won’t be careful produces friction in every session.
A flat tone that breaks twice is more effective than one that breaks continuously. Count the breaks in your own draft and remove most of them.
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’s not complicated. Scorsese’s film is among 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’s violent toward his wife and brother and is given no redemption, was difficult to watch, and didn’t 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’s 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. That means it went eight for two on a night this film went six for four.
What the Result Cost
Winning damaged the film’s reputation in a way losing wouldn’t have. That’s the recurring observation on this page.
People would remember a competent, well-observed family drama that lost to Raging Bull as a good film from a strong year. Because the same film beat it, people remember it as an error, and nobody watches an error. That’s unfair, because this is a better film than its reputation and the Academy did it no favors.
That’s a real unfairness to everybody involved except the institution that made the choice. Hutton, Moore and Hirsch are all doing excellent work in a film that’s now mostly a sentence in an argument. Donald Sutherland was also not nominated. That’s 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 can’t, and Sutherland plays the whole arc in reaction.
Redford also never directed anything this good again. That’s the other half of the picture. Quiz Show is close and A River Runs Through It’s 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.
Winning the wrong award damages a work permanently. The comparison becomes the work’s primary association and nothing it contains can answer that. Nobody can plan for this, so understand it as a category of thing that happens to work. A competent work in a strong year is a good outcome. A competent work that displaces a great one acquires an argument it didn’t make.
Judge the film and the Oscar result separately. A review that lets the result set the rating has stopped being a review. Applying that here gives a 7. It’s a well-made, well-acted, formally unambitious film about a real subject, and that’s what a 7 is for on this site, whatever happened at the ceremony in March 1981.
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 can’t love her son, a psychiatrist who won’t be careful, and a reputation permanently damaged by a statue it shouldn’t have been given.
The 7 is where I land because the film is exactly as good as its three lead performances and its screenplay, and it stops there. Moore, Hutton and Hirsch give me everything I want from a family drama, while Redford’s direction is careful and plain with no formal idea behind it. It should have lost to Raging Bull, and I suspect it would be better loved today if it had.
