Ordinary People (1980)

Conrad "Con" Jarrett: "Uh... I don't know. It was like... falling into a hole. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and you can't escape. All of a sudden, it's inside... and you're the hole. You're trapped. And it's all over. Something like that. It's not really scary... except when you think back on it. 'Cause you know what you were feeling..."

By Robert Redforth
With Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch

I met this movie after reading the novel Ordinary People (1975) and finding out it was adapted as a film. I decided to see it, not knowing it had won an Academy Award. It was also a plus that it starred Timothy Hutton who I admired from Beautiful Girls (1996).

This is perhaps one of the rare cases where the movie adaptation surpasses the novel. I think the narrative, the themes which the book explores, translate far better to film--the subtleties which can't often be framed in words or as powerfully expressed in descriptions are relayed masterfully in the movie. This is an ordinary [no pun intended] movie, about an ordinary family living in an ordinary town. Like the cliched quote "still waters run deep" the very banality of this particular suburb and this particular family, the Jarrets, is an illusion, quick to shatter with the death of their son, a boy named Buck. Six months after the event, all seems to have been healed only barring the shadow of Conrad--the younger boy's--suicide attempt.

The film is a character study, focusing on the faces of the characters, and the humble, every day speech and the every-day violence they experience or inflict. The mother and father resist easy interpretations--the mother's nearly obsessive attention to detail and propriety, the father's lost puppy-dog look as he tries to bridge the gap between mother and son, and Conrad, who finds himself unable to play the role the older (now deceased) brother played. One of the most revealing moments in the film was one not included in the book, where his grandparents try to take a family portrait and Conrad is forced to stand in the middle, between his parents. His presence is like a wedge that serves to drive the parents further and further apart.

Many have no sympathy for the mother, whose attention to detail and focus on society and impressions seems shallow and trivial. Yet she is struggling a profound battle with herself, a battle which is fought precisely by the obsessive measures she takes. When a plate breaks, she takes satisfaction that the break was smooth and can be glued together again. In a world where she feels she is not in control, where she can handle very little, her beautiful, neat face is never allowed to crumple, she is never allowed to let her mask slip. When Conrad walks in on her sitting in Buck's bedroom, her gaze unfixed, her body slack for the first time in the film, she jolts when she realizes his presence, and collects herself immediately.

Conrad, too, struggles similarly with control. When he visits a therapist and is asked what he wants to work on, he says he wants to be in control again. Echoing a statement his father makes at the end of the film, the reason why he and his mother can never get along is because they are too much alike. Buck was the mediator of the family, the go-between and bridge. Without him the family slowly but surely nosedives to its destruction.

The film re-enacts many of the cliches of dysfunctional family tropes, such as the family meal scenes which become a site of hostility, the strained holidays, the dinner parties where everyone else's family seems so much more 'normal' in comparison, the cathartic breakthrough scene in a therapist's office where the therapist makes you realize it's not your fault and you have nothing to be guilty about (see: Good Will Hunting (1997)). In many ways it felt like watching a play--the set is minimal, most attention is placed on the interactions of the people.

Ordinary People never feels forced and the dialogue is particularly cutting because of its honesty and reality. The somewhat Oedipal cycle of the mother, father, and son is well played out and the film ends on an honest and frightening note--with every character undergoing an internal revolution, the scabs torn open and the wounds fresh.

I liked: The modest set. There is very little to occupy your eyes other than the characters. Even the colors are normal, not the slick over contrasted colors of cinema today (although that might have to do with development in film making). The economy of the dialogue is particularly stunning, and this might be one of the most violently hurtful films I have seen.

I disliked: Some of the secondary characters were not as fleshed out as they were in the novel. However I do realize the film had to have some limitations, and perhaps since it was almost 2 hours long already, it would have been too difficult to include those details as well.

92/100
I have no reservations in recommending this film. Usually I would tell someone to read the book first but in this case, both the film and book are strong in different ways, and both hold their own independently of one another. Watch this movie if family dynamics/politics interests you at all, or if you are interested psychologically motivated films that don't hesitate to explore the more gristly aspects of growing up and family interactions.