Ordinary People (1980) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / 21 September 2014

Ordinary People is a film arguably most remembered for the fact it “stole” the Oscars for Best Picture and Director from Scorsese’s Raging Bull which is now considered the more impressive and influential film. Open any ‘Times The Oscars Got it Wrong’ list and the chances of Ordinary People being mentioned are as high as the chance that the next Michael Bay flick will spend 90% of its budget on special effects, 9% on the actors’ salaries and the remaining 1% on the script…but now I’m just being silly. Ordinary People, in all honesty, is far from the terrible film people perceive it to be because it ‘stole the Oscar from Raging Bull.’ I have come across descriptions along the lines of ‘a tv film that got lucky,’ etc. The question of which film should have won the Oscar is irrelevant when judging the film itself. The fact is that film buffs all over the world have used the Oscar’s stupidity to avert their eyes from the things Ordinary People actually does well and those are plenty.

            Ordinary People, unsurprisingly, is about ordinary people…more or less. It fits into the tradition of films that are interested in exploring how Happy Suburban Life of the ‘50s is merely an illusion. On the surface, the Jarrett family – consisting of Calvin (Donald Sutherland), Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) and their son Conrad (Timothy Hutton) – appears to be a typical happy family. Beneath it all however, Conrad is suffering from PTSD and survivors guilt due to losing his brother Buck in a sailing accident, Beth is obsessed with keeping up appearances and denies her own feelings on losing Buck, and Calvin attempts to get closer to both Conrad and his emotionally distant wife.

It’s easy to pigeonhole Beth as the ‘villain,’ but the film shows such psychological insight that it allows us to empathize with her, to understand her despite her acting like a bitch toward Conrad on a pretty regular basis. We know she’s suppressing her own emotions, we know Conrad probably reminds her of Buck and she can’t handle it. Moore’s performance only enhances this feeling of empathy. Moore had pretty much become America’s Sweetheart through shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but showed a lot of guts here in breaking free of that mold and showing she could play a challenging, emotionally complex character.

            As with the character of Beth, the rest of the characters (most notably, of course, Calvin and Conrad) are treated with the same amount of respect by director Robert Redford and the screenplay. Though I’ve never been much of a Sutherland fan, he plays this part pretty darn well, displaying the awkwardness of wanting to improve the relationship with his son while also being forced to reevaluate his marriage to Beth. Timothy Hutton would never land a role on this level again, proving that Oscars don’t singlehandedly launch careers into stardom. Like Moore, Judd Hirsch breaks his Taxi persona and plays Conrad’s very likeable therapist in an all too rare display of film therapy done well. While the subject matter (PTSD, denial, the illusion of a happy life, etc.) well-trodden territory, it’s the execution and director Redford’s empathy for the characters that makes Ordinary People a fulfilling experience.