Film review

Robert Redford (1980)

The Jarretts live in a large, handsome house in Lake Forest, a posh suburb of Chicago.  Calvin Jarrett (Donald Sutherland) is a successful tax attorney.  His wife Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) is a meticulous homemaker, active in the local community.  Their teenage son Conrad (Timothy Hutton) is a bright high-school student, a leading light on the school swim team, a tenor in the choir.  On paper, the set-up of Ordinary People hints at an appearances-are-deceptive story, in which the enviable externals of a materially comfortable, conventional world will be gradually stripped away to reveal unexpected, troubling depths.  In fact, you can see from the opening sequence – a choir practice – that something’s wrong:  Conrad’s tense face and the dark rings round his eyes announce that he’s struggling.  It soon emerges that he has only recently returned home and to school after a four-month spell in a psychiatric hospital, following a suicide attempt.  Not much later in the film, we learn there used to be a fourth member of the Jarrett family, Conrad’s elder brother, Buck (Scott Doebler, glimpsed in flashbacks and photographs about the house).  The two boys were out together in a small sailing boat when a storm blew up, the boat capsized and Buck drowned.  There are things to admire in Robert Redford’s multi-award-winning directing debut – mostly the acting – but the nature of the Jarretts’ problems is so soon apparent that subsequent crisis points in the story feel artificially delayed.  What’s more, the psychological strands of the plot don’t knit together convincingly.

The first scenes chez Jarrett introduce the family as a casebook study in failure of communication, though father and mother are polar opposites in how they fail to communicate with son.  Calvin, a benign, awkward figure, is almost painfully concerned for Conrad’s welfare but can’t, until much later in the film, find words to express his feelings.  Beth’s appearance gives her away.  She wears perfectly colour-coordinated outfits, usually tans, beiges or fawns (except when she’s playing golf and breaks out into brighter colours).  The creases in her tailored trousers are razor sharp.  She’s perfectly groomed – hair, make-up, the whole face she presents to the world.  Beth is also, evidently, lacking in warmth, ease and affection, at least as far as Conrad is concerned.  Despite his wife’s being against the idea, Calvin persuades his son to see a psychiatrist, Dr Berger (Judd Hirsch).  From this point in the narrative, the household’s suppressive status quo begins to wobble.

Dr Berger’s ethnicity doesn’t help.  ‘Jewish doctor?’ her mother (Meg Mundy) asks Beth.  ‘I don’t know,’ her daughter replies uncomfortably, ‘I suppose he’s Jewish.  Maybe just German …’   It’s fortunate that Beth never claps eyes on Conrad’s shrink.  As well as Jewish, Berger is unkempt and his cramped consulting room a mess, the antithesis of the Jarrett ice-palace.  Redford and Alvin Sargent (whose screenplay for Ordinary People is an adaptation of Judith Guest’s 1976 novel of the same name) neatly illustrate the double-edged standing of psychotherapy in the Jarretts’ social circle.  At a party they go to, Beth overhears Calvin’s conversation with another guest, a woman (Cynthia Burke) who has asked how Conrad’s doing.  In the car on the way home, Beth is furious:  Calvin shouldn’t be telling others about their son’s mental health problems – it’s a private matter.  Calvin is baffled, pointing out that half the people at the party will be seeing a therapist regularly.  They’re both right.  In the Jarretts’ peer group, choosing to see a shrink can function as a status symbol.  Needing to see one, especially in the light of Conrad’s recent history, is a social stigma.

In other respects, though, the film is a traditional psychoanalysis screen story.  In the sessions with Berger, Conrad is at first irritably reticent; next come shouting matches between doctor and patient; the cathartic breakthrough follows in due course, as Conrad is made to confront the crux of his trauma – that the elder brother he so admired, died while Conrad lived.  The breakthrough comes as Conrad is struggling to take in another shock:  Karen (Dinah Manoff), a fellow patient in the psychiatric hospital, whom he got to know and like, has committed suicide.  With his parents away for a few days, Conrad is staying with his maternal grandmother and grandfather (Richard Whiting) when he learns the news about Karen.  He suffers an extended flashback to the boating accident and rushes out into the street and a phone box, where he calls Berger’s home number and says he must see him immediately.  It’s late at night but the doctor obliges and gets Conrad to relive the accident – to realise it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t get the boat’s sail down as Buck yelled at him to do, that Buck couldn’t hang on and went under.

For much of the film, Redford’s direction is carefully modulated (reminiscent of his own acting style).  As Ordinary People reaches its climax, though, the director, like his characters, seems to be losing control.  The sequence in which Conrad sees the light, and which ends with his falling into Dr Berger’s arms, weeping in relief, is overwrought but plausible – more than can be said for another high-volume scene just afterwards.  Beth and Calvin, during their short stay in Texas with Beth’s brother Ward (Quinn Redeker) and his wife Audrey (Mariclare Costello), are coming off the golf course; Beth, exhilarated at having made her last putt, suggests a longer golfing holiday and where she and Calvin might go.  When her husband says he thinks Conrad would enjoy one of the places mentioned, Beth’s mood switches instantly.  ‘Do you do that deliberately or is it just a reflex?’ she snaps at Calvin, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t felt the need to call him since we’ve been here’.  This triggers a prolonged argument between them, Beth eventually yelling at Ward, too.  Audrey watches, open-mouthed, along with other golfers who hear the racket.  There’s no way that Beth, according to the film’s conception of her, would allow this to happen.  She would hold her fire at least until she and Calvin were on their own together.

Beth’s outburst at her brother nevertheless succeeds in highlighting the other key aspect of Ordinary People‘s psychological drama.  When Ward tries to calm things down, telling his sister ‘we just want you to be happy’, she furiously replies, ‘Happy?  … Ward, you tell me the definition of happy – but first, you better make sure that your kids are good and safe!’   As soon as we know the circumstances in which Buck died, we can be sure that Conrad’s problem is survivor’s guilt but it’s guilt compounded by his mother’s attitude towards him and his brother.  Buck was always Beth’s favourite, to put it mildly:  in a verging-on-creepy flashback to the two of them enjoying a fun family moment, Beth looks to flirt with her elder son.  Conrad is bound to blame himself for Buck’s death because his mother blames him, too.  The unhappy situation calls to mind the life of J M Barrie, whose mother never recovered from the death of Barrie’s elder brother, David, the mother’s favourite, in an ice-skating accident.  There’s the terrible story, recounted by the writer in the memoir Margaret Ogilvy, of how her surviving son entered his mother’s bedroom, she said, ‘Is that you?’  and Barrie realised ‘it was the dead boy she was speaking to’.   A moment in Ordinary People nearly replicates this.  Beth, alone in the house, goes into Buck’s old room and sits on his bed; the room, still-just-how-he-left-it, is a cliché, of course, but the scene means more when Conrad, who Beth hasn’t heard return home, appears in the doorway and startles his mother.  His repeated apologies – for making Beth jump but really for so much more – is one of the film’s most poignant moments.

Beth Jarrett is living proof that, if your heart isn’t in the right place, make sure everything else is; as such, she’s the villain of the piece.  Yet her love for Buck contradicts the idea that she’s unfeeling.  Her anger in the golf course car park contradicts, however aberrantly, the idea that she can’t now let her feelings show.  The filmmakers give Beth no credit for either and show her no sympathy for the terrible tragedy she suffered in losing Buck.  Because, in loving him, she withheld love for Conrad – even before she could also blame him for Buck’s death – Beth is still the villain.  Her marital relationship with Calvin is relatively vague: once her husband finds his tongue and, in the climactic showdown between them, demands to know if ‘you love me … really love me’, Beth can only reply, ‘I feel the way I’ve always felt about you’.  Calvin, who has turned psychoanalyst on the strength of one conversation with Dr Berger, then informs Beth that:

‘We would’ve been all right, if there hadn’t been any …mess.  But you can’t handle mess.  You need everything neat and …easy.  I don’t know.  Maybe you can’t love anybody.  It was so much Buck.  And Buck died, it was as if you buried all your love with him, and I don’t understand that.  I just don’t know. … Maybe it wasn’t even Buck.  Maybe it was just you.  Maybe, finally, it was the best of you that you buried.’

At which point, Calvin seems to have rambled towards the realisation that he maybe isn’t as good at psychoanalysis as he thought, and so resorts to the time-honoured screen words, ‘I don’t know who you are’.  In saying them, he nonetheless articulates Ordinary People’s fundamental problem:  Robert Redford and Alvin Sargent don’t seem to know who Beth is either, except that she’s in the wrong.

Ordinary People followed hot on the heels of Robert Benton’s Kramer vs Kramer as the winner of the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.  Both films were despised (even at the time and more in later years) as typically safe, undeserving choices on the Academy’s part.  These were minor domestic pieces that didn’t begin to compare with the films which cinéastes reckon should have won in the years in question, Apocalypse Now (1979) and Raging Bull (1980); as for the directors, Benton and Redford were minnows beside Coppola and Scorsese.  While Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull are both (I think) very flawed, there’s no doubt they’re works of greater artistry and imagination than Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People but those two Academy victors have something else in common, too – something interesting because it now would be so unacceptable in mainstream Hollywood.  Both stories culminate in a resounding defeat for the main female character – a defeat reflected in her eventual exit from the arena.

At the start of Kramer vs Kramer, Meryl Streep’s Joanna Kramer walks out on her husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and their little son Billy (Justin Henry), exchanging New York for California, where she can find herself (or something).  During her absence, Ted, whose workaholism made him neglect his family, also goes through a process of self-discovery:  he’s a loving, wonderful father after all.  Joanna returns, mission accomplished (somehow), ready to resume motherhood.  Although she wins custody of Billy in a courtroom battle with Ted, she finally accepts losing the moral argument as to who’s the more deserving parent.  Arriving to take Billy away from Ted, Joanna thinks again and slinks away, allowing the perfect father-son relationship to continue.  Joanna’s role is so underwritten that it’s hard even to say that Benton has it in for her (Streep was dissatisfied enough with her courtroom monologue that, with Benton’s agreement, she rewrote it from scratch) but that’s almost beside the point.  The emotional logic of the narrative dictates a triumphant happy ending for Ted:  Joanna’s departure makes tendentious sense.  Ordinary People is more likeable and a better film than Kramer vs Kramer but Beth Jarrett’s final act doesn’t make sense (even allowing Beth is a muddled conception).  After that last exchange with Calvin, Beth immediately packs a suitcase and leaves, supposedly for Texas – that’s what Calvin tells Conrad anyway, before they sob and hug each other, sitting outside the house in the early morning light.  We could believe that events had destroyed the Jarretts’ marriage and that they would agree to divorce.  It’s hard to believe Beth’s instant self-banishment from a place created and maintained in her own image.

Ordinary People swerves thoroughgoing misogyny through the treatment of the two girls in Conrad’s life, Karen and Jeannine Pratt (Elizabeth McGovern), a member of his choir.  Both girls really benefit the story.  The scenes involving them aren’t only well acted but consistently well written and directed, too.  Dinah Manoff’s Karen has only one scene, when she and Conrad meet in a restaurant, but it’s one of the film’s most effective.  Bubbly Karen seems genuinely in much better emotional shape than Conrad until the effort of staying upbeat starts to show.  Karen brings the meeting to a premature end.  She has already said goodbye to Conrad and turned away when she suddenly stops, calls ‘Hey’, too loudly and urgently, to attract his attention; as he swings round, Karen, desperately humorous, tells him to cheer up.  As Jeannine (whose chat-up line is ‘You’re a terrific tenor’) and Conrad tentatively grow closer, you find yourself looking forward to the next scene between them.  Elizabeth McGovern soon became a dull actress (witness Once Upon a Time in America (1984)) and has stayed that way but she’s great in this film, made when she was still just eighteen.  McGovern’s surprisingly deep voice is eccentric yet reassuring; she makes Jeannine unusually attractive (in both senses of ‘unusually’).  She and Conrad fall out briefly; their reconciliation scene is a welcome, low-key relief, sandwiched as it is between Conrad’s night in Berger’s office and the misjudged sequence at the Texas golf course.  We can see in Jeannine – and realise that Conrad also sees in her – the appealing prospect of a happy adult life after his grisly adolescence.

Nineteen-year-old Timothy Hutton is at his best in his scenes with Dinah Manoff and Elizabeth McGovern.  His baffled misery is very expressive in the conversation with Karen.  He relishes the opportunity to lighten up in some of the Jeannine bits.  He may have felt freer in sequences with relatively minor characters – he’s good too in Conrad’s exchanges with his swimming coach (M Emmet Walsh) – than in the heavy-duty passages with the parents and the psychiatrist but Redford helps Hutton deliver a strong performance throughout:  his Best Supporting Actor Oscar was well deserved.  (He’s still the youngest winner of that award.)

Given Mary Tyler Moore’s sunny TV persona at the time and popular appeal, casting her as Beth was both imaginative and shrewd.  She has a thankless task in that her character is obvious yet confused but she plays the role admirably and expertly.  Donald Sutherland also does fine work even though Calvin too is somewhat contradictory:  although he seems meant to be mired in social convention, he never, unlike his wife, fits comfortably into the Jarretts’ social set.  When we first see them in public together, in a theatre audience with friends, Beth, along with the other couple, is determinedly enjoying the play while Calvin is dozing.  Out jogging with another acquaintance, Calvin is clearly bored by the other man’s rabbiting on about stocks and shares.  He groans at the prospect of going to a party.  He asks for a meeting with Dr Berger because he thinks he can ‘shed light on a few things’; Calvin, though he kicks off by saying he’s not a great believer in psychiatry, does indeed give Berger helpful information about what’s gone on in the family.  He clearly enjoys the opportunity to talk – so much so that he then suggests, to his wife’s horror, that they both accompany Conrad to one of the sessions with Berger.

There isn’t a weak link in the main cast, whose playing Redford orchestrates very skilfully.  Yet the precision of the acting and direction in Ordinary People has the effect of pointing up the defects of the material.  The graceful, melancholy Pachlebel music on the soundtrack, the ‘poetic’ shots of windblown leaves as the trees in the grounds of the Jarretts’ mansion prepare for winter – these are designed to give an impression of subtlety but it’s a false impresssion.  Some of those instances of Calvin’s outsiderness in affluent Lake Forest society are so salient because Redford can nail the place’s ethos too easily.  He’s not into harsh social satire but we can’t fail to notice that the play that sends Calvin to sleep is drearily innocuous, that most of the conversation at the party Calvin dreads is self-centred and trivial.  Things aren’t much less transparent even inside the Jarrett home, especially the symbolism around Beth’s cutlery and crockery.  There’s more than one shot of her fastidiously laying a table.  It’s a sign of how unnerved she is by Conrad’s behaviour that, during a visit from her parents, Beth breaks a plate in the kitchen.  Her mother, when she hears the noise and then sees what caused it, can hardly believe her ears and eyes – ‘Beth!’ she exclaims incredulously, as if her daughter had exploded a bomb.  This leads into their conversation about Conrad’s seeing Dr Berger.  When her mother asks, ‘What does Cal say about all this?’, Beth ignores the question.  Instead, she smiles as she holds up the two pieces of the plate and puts them together:  ‘You know, I think this can be saved.  It’s a nice clean break’.

30 June 2025