Ordinary People

Of all the movies left on my Best Picture winner watchlist, this was one I was kind of dreading. "A upper-class family falls apart after losing a one son and the attempted suicide of the other" sounded, at best, like a maudlin soap opera, and at worst, manipulative and trite. And considering when this was made, at a time when mental health was usually dismissed with glib ignorance, I couldn't believe this could possibly be respectful or nuanced. So it is to my utter shock that Ordinary People turned out to be a delicate, respectful, poignant look at how different people handle (or don't handle) grief, and how it can corrode what should be the strongest bonds between people. It never belittles the subject, it never plays the "look, rich people have problems too!" card, and it never tries for corny emotional manipulation. In fact, to that last one, this is so gingerly directed, I was almost in shock at how much Ordinary People respects its performers, the script, and the audience. There is barely any score whatsoever, letting the acting and writing do the heavy lifting. Each member of the three-person family has depth and is given the chance to explore it, both on their own and in relation to one another. One of the more brilliant aspects of Ordinary People is the casting; given their other roles, one might come into this expecting Donald Sutherland as a dad to be stoic to the point of cold, and Mary Tyler Moore to be warm and bubbly. It is therefore a total broadside to see that Sutherland's Calvin is soft, kind, and gentle, while Moore's Beth is hardened and short-tempered. The son they lost, the older boy, seemed to have been a more dynamic personality, a good-natured boy who needed some guidance from being a troublemaker. Calvin did all he could to keep him on the straight and narrow, while Beth doted on him because he was her first. Their youngest, Conrad, didn't need the guidance, so he kind of got lost in the shadow of his older brother. Without him, they've all become unmoored; Conrad tried to take his own life in grief and survivor's guilty, so Calvin has tread too lightly, afraid to engage Conrad at all besides praise. Beth has gone the other direction, putting up a brave front that comes off as cold and dismissive, and because nobody else is doing it, she's pushing her family away. And Conrad is trying to come to terms with his grief and guilt. I understood why everyone was where they were emotionally, and moreover, why everybody goes on the journey they do and wind up where they are at the movie's end. It's not pleasant, but it is realistic, and I'd rather have the latter over the former any day when the subject matter is this weighty. That being said, this isn't a perfect movie. Timothy Hutton's performance as Conrad is wonderful, rich and layered and believable as he comes to terms with his feelings, but how suddenly he does this is laughable to the point of being insulting to the idea of therapy. You can almost see a light bulb go off above his head. Similarly, Moore's Beth should be more sympathetic; there's a moment where she goes into her dead son's room and just sits there, and you can see her struggling with the sadness, and it should be heart-breaking, because she's on the verge of letting the mask slip ... but she's such a pill the entire movie, she treats her family so poorly, it's hard to feel bad for her, even when we know where it's coming from. A few more touches of humanity from her would've gone a long way, even with the ending. And then there's the editing. People under-estimate editing, because good editing often goes unnoticed from the average person. It's like a good magician; when the art form is at its best, you see it all come together, but you don't see how. But when the editing is bad, its prominence is painfully obvious, and Ordinary People has what I can only call misplaced editing. Whoever did the deed seems to have thought they were editing some fast-paced action movie, perhaps the chase scenes in Bullitt or The French Connection, because the editing here is nothing short of harried. So many scenes are cut short, forbidding them to breathe for even a moment, sometimes even mid-sentence. This is not a fast-paced movie, not even close. This is a deliberate, measured, psychological profile, not Enter The Dragon. All the editing in Ordinary People does for it is detract, making it feel like every scene is in a hurry to get somewhere that the story does not share. It by no means ruins the movie, but it once you see it, you won't un-see it. As I said at the top, I was surprised by Ordinary People. I was expecting morose, TV-movie-of-the-week, manipulative melodrama, and instead, I got a touching drama way ahead of its time, anchored by three amazing performances, two by actors in roles the opposite of what you'd expect. The editing could be a lot better, and some of the characterization is inconsistent, but overall, this is a lot better than I could've hoped for. It won't be the kind of movie that one re-watches, but it's worth that one time.