"Ordinary People" has considerable notoriety as what the voters (mostly actors...) of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deemed the best movie of 1980. They also gave Robert Redford an Oscar for directing "Ordinary People" (henceforth, OR) instead of to Martin Scorsese for directing "Raging Bull." Having just watched OR again, I am even more astounded that -- in his movie debut -- Timothy Hutton won an Oscar as best supporting actor, because he is on screen more than any other character in the movie. Lucky for Hutton was not nominated in competition with Robert DeNiro, whose Jake LaMotta won the best actor award; unlucky for Judd Hirsch, whose performance as a savvy psychiatrist in OR might otherwise have won the award.

Academy voters have made far worse choices (see http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-E51-2CC0B514-399D819C-prod5). In addition to Hutton and the Oscar-nominated Hirsch and Mary Tyler Moore, OR has perhaps the best performance Donald Sutherland has even delivered, a charming debut by Elizabeth McGovern, and there is no part that is not played well. Moore was playing most against type as Beth, the brittle suburban mother unable to show (or, I think, feel) any love for her surviving son, Conrad (Hutton). She does not have to say that the one who drowned, Buck (played in flashbacks by Scott Doebler), was her favorite and she wishes that Conrad had died instead of Buck. No one -- and least of all the very sensitive Conrad -- could fail to notice her unwillingness even to try to connect to her surviving son.

In a particularly fraught scene, her husband Calvin Jarrett (Sutherland) tells her that all Conrad wants from her is reassurance that she does not hate him. She scoffs that by definition a mother cannot hate any of her children, but she does not say that she loves her surviving son and also fails to answer a later question in the garage from Calvin about the day of Buck's funeral and her priorities. She also says nothing after the climactic non-confrontation in which Calvin tells her that he doesn't know if he loves her any more.

Sutherland has a lot of words in that middle-of-the-night scene and his delivery of them is a marvel of acting that deserves the highest praise. Rather than any chirpy response that ignores the content of what he's said, Beth goes up to pack a bag. Aided by Pachelbel's Canon played slower than I've ever heard it anywhere else (indeed, the notes so far apart that only their familiarity indicates that there is a melody) Moore shows her character's inability to feel (never mind "get in touch with" her feelings!). She'd already had an implosion more physical than verbal (though not nonverbal) on a Houston golf course.

Both Moore and Sutherland are extraordinary as a couple unable to recover from the death of one son and the barely averted suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization of the other. Hutton also delivers a great performance of survivor guilt and bewilderment pile on to the turmoils of adolescence in American suburbia. As a co-inmate in the psychiatric facility, Dinah Manoff as Karen also deserves special praise.

I found Hirsch a bit too good to be true as Dr. Berger, but can only wish that every patient could have so no-nonsense a therapist of such wisdom. M. Emmet Walsh is also very good as (swim-team) Coach Salan as is Meg Mundy as Beth's mother, who is far better grounded than Beth is.

I think that the adaptation (by Alvin Sargent that also won an Oscar) of Judith Guest's novel could have been brought in in under two hours (it runs four minutes over) with fewer flashbacks and a less schematic therapeutic breakthrough, but these are minor faults.

What makes me skeptical about OR being a great movie is the pedestrian cinematography of John Bailey (whose spectacular, stylized work in Paul Shrader's "Mishima" I love; he also lensed "The Big Chill", "As Good As It Gets," and "Groundhog Day," none of which is much remembered for its look). Maybe it looked better in 1980 and the print has gone fuzzy, but I don't think so. Except for a staircase that looks like it was carpeted with Astroturf, the look of OR is dull. The other films directed by Redford that I've seen look great (A River Runs Through It, in particular, but also "The Milagro Beanfield War," "Quiz Show," and "The Legend of Bagger Vance").

For ensemble acting, OR may be better than "Raging Bull" -- and I've never heard of anyone wanting to take Robert DeNiro's best actor Oscar away. As cinema, "Raging Bull" may be too flamboyantly auteurist for some, but OR, unfortunately, looks like a made-for-tv movie.

And I'd have no trouble at all choosing the best picture of 1980, "Kagemusha," and reallocating the directing Oscar to Akira Kurosawa (the Academy voters did not even pick "Kagemusha" as best foreign-language film, perhaps feeling that Kurosawa films had been honored often).


© 2008, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes