Review of Ordinary People (1980) by Spermian J — 30 Mar 2014

Most people who watch "Ordinary People" today, 35 years on, surely do so because they're Oscar completists. For most people making their way through the list, it's probably one of the last Best Picture winners they make themselves sit down and watch. It's acquired an unfortunate reputation as being one of the Academy's "mistakes," since it beat the more stylistically-challenging "Raging Bull." The reason that's unfortunate is that it's unfair to the movie, which taken on its own terms is a perceptive examination of a family's grief.

In honoring "Ordinary People" with the Best Picture and Best Director statues, Hollywood awarded for the first time one of its most genial figures, Robert Redford. As his directorial debut this is, appropriate enough, a genial movie. But it is difficult to explain why it is a good movie without explaining why it is not a great movie. It is a serious film that deals with death and suicide and broken homes, but it must be acknowledged even by the sympathetic reviewer that its handling of these issues is not much more serious or creative than a "Very Special Episode" of some '80s or '90s TV drama. It focuses squarely, all too squarely, on the "humanity" of its characters, and it hand-holds the audience through the plot all too gently. It feels, if not preachy, then like a therapy session that we've been assigned to attend because we have not been sufficiently attentive to the pain within ourselves and others. The always-on, always-sensitive tone of this kind of storytelling can be exhausting because it lacks the temporary relief that a little cynicism and distance can provide. The movie demands that you care for all of its characters all the time. This is a tough ask under the best of conditions, but especially when the characters hew too close to stock stereotypes. The high school students all fall pretty neatly into the standard categories of brainless jocks and quirky loners, and the parents are the overly-busy, clueless, grown-apart kinds we've seen before. At the beginning, Redford's directorial style, with its straight-on symmetrical shots of a dining room table and a camera that looks back and forth at people having a conversation like a crowd looks at a tennis match, seems equally unoriginal, but this decision actually pays off toward the end when the same pace simplicity are used to cross-cut a flashback sequence. In the latter case, the person having the flashback is really having a long-delayed, straightforward dialogue with himself, and the visual style suits this culmination well. Yet it is, after all, much like other revelatory and epiphany-creating flashbacks in film and TV.

The ordinariness of "Ordinary People" is probably held against it more than it would be had it not won its Oscars, but at the same time far fewer people would probably watch it today had it not won them. And that would be a shame, because despite its shortcomings, it is an occasionally very perceptive film. For all the times it is too "on the nose" with a song choice ("Hallelujah" when a character is happy) or a line of dialogue (how many times has "I miss him too, you know!" been declaimed on screen?), there are also moments of real observational insight, as when an introverted character presses the "close door" button on an elevator rather than risk a social encounter. That rings true, and thankfully it happens without being directly commented upon. The movie also casts Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore against type, which is interesting to see. To watch "Ordinary People" is to be reminded that Redford is, by all appearances, a refreshingly warmhearted and compassionate celebrity in an industry that too often rewards egoists and borderline sociopaths. I may be in a minority, but I frankly think it's nice that movies like this can and do win Best Picture over movies that are superior in technique but colder and bleaker in outlook.