Ordinary People

For the longest time, the only time I heard about Ordinary People was when people mentioned that it robbed Raging Bull of Best Director and Best Picture Oscars in 1980. Then I saw Timothy Hutton in Beautiful Girls a while back and tried to find out what he's all about. Turns out he won a deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1980 for Ordinary People. "Huh," I said. "I oughtta see that." And now i finally have.

Ordinary People is a film boiling over with emotional truth. The ordinary people of the title are relatable. I could know them. I could be them. I certainly saw parts of myself in characters.

The film is about a family struggling to connect and keep a sense of normality after the accidental death of one son and the attempted suicide of another. That's enough to make any family crack. And they certainly do.

Hutton plays the son, Conrad, who attempted suicide. The film starts as he is going back to school at the beginning of a new school year. He received the Oscar for a supporting role, but his story anchors the entire film. He carries it. Everybody else helps, but he shoulders the best of it.

He delivered a big, bright, and amazing performance. Somehow he was able to stare blankly at nothing and convey an avalanche of thought behind his eyes. His awkwardness and anger in therapy scenes with Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch) were accurately and believable performed. What really struck me in those scenes was the details he put into inflection, stops and starts, and change in emotions that were impeccable.

Hirsch played the dream psychiatrist, one who pulls you through your reluctance and resistance to a place you could never have reached on your own. It might be a movie myth - this amazing type of psychiatrist. But it certainly works in Ordinary People.

I liked that the love story between Conrad and a co-ed (Elizabeth McGovern), although helpful and ultimately rewarding, was shown as a brief interruption from troubles, but ultimately not the answer. A lesser movie would have made the journey to revelation for Conrad be with his girlfriend and not his psychiatrist.

Conrad's parents are a mess. They're able to fake pleasantness and stability, even happiness, but it's all just an escape from all the shit that keeps happening around them. The father Call, played by Donald Sutherland, is attempting to address the hardships head-on. The mother Beth, played by Mary Tyler Moore is trying to get over it all and get on with their lives.

The parents are a flip on conventional parental and gender roles. Cal is worried, nurturing, loving, and supportive. Beth is emotionally distant and/or callous, and wants to gloss over the past in favor of a happy future. This displays a characteristic common to all the characters and performances. They are all complicated, layered, and detailed.

I've never seen Sutherland like this before cautious, questioning, contemplative. And his work as a father fits him well. It's hard when an actor's been around so long that and the young people (myself and contemporaries) are only familiar with his work in Outbreak, The Italian Job, and The Puppet Masters. He's good.

Moore is amazing in this role. It's the performance of a lifetime. Her Beth is complicated and maddening but still sympathetic somehow amongst all her transgressions. When her characters was finally revealed as weak, the revelation clarified everything that preceded it and acted like a magnifying glass on Moore's perfect gift for imperfections.

Robert Redford directed the movie and handles his performers exceptionally well. His handling of flashbacks and memories was less successful. The echoed voices, the fuzzy outlines, the quick cuts - it's all too conventional and too showy for a movie that is able to understate other big themes and performances so well.

This movie was like therapy for me. The aftermath of a suicide attempt is familiar. The loss of control. The way others handle you with kid gloves that bothers ya', or bothers ya' when they don't. And most familiar was the struggling with what confronting real, raw, and honest emotions will mean. Ordinary People does it all so well.

Good Will Hunting and American Beauty owe debts to Ordinary People. They didn't steal from it, but they still owe a lot.

****