Ordinary, Indeed

“31 Days of Oscar” on TCM usually means there’s always something on cable in February to prevent one—-well, all right, to prevent me—-from watching endless reruns of “Project Runway” as if I don’t know every button and ruche. Last night I caught a movie I haven’t watched in many, many years: the 1980 Best Picture winner, “Ordinary People.” Just as I was once in thrall to the Marchmains, the dysfunctional family in Brideshead Revisited, I was also drawn to the Jarretts of Lake Forest, Illinois. I was drawn to the setting, drawn to the brittle, even unpleasant performance by Mary Tyler Moore, and drawn to the dramatization of “a failure to communicate.” I realized, watching the film after nearly thirty years, that I too made the mistake of once believing that communicating was enough.

They’re called movies for mechanical reasons, but I think we Americans also mishear the idea of emotional ones in the label: they move us to laugh, to cry, to “come to terms,” as the ad campaign for another Best Picture would have it a few years after “Ordinary People.” Well, I was moved all right: moved to recognition of how young I was when Judith Guest’s airless family melodrama transferred to screen. But I was also too young to know that the story was airless, or was a melodrama. Watching it now, there didn’t seem to be an authentic note in Mary Tyler Moore’s performance, which I was once naïve enough to think “one of the great all-time screen performances” (as if I’d seen anything yet). But then Moore has always been an odd screen actress. Her girlish, brittle vulnerability worked in television comedy, but on the larger screen she didn’t really connect with the audience until “Flirting with Disaster.”

Donald Sutherland and Judd Hirsch are fine—-Sutherland, with his odd, reptilian face, has never really gotten his due, but seems to be getting it now, and Hirsch is very nearly a caricature of a “Feel! Feel!” movie psychiatrist (a role he ultimately, laughably took in “Independence Day”). Gene Hackman was supposed to play the role of Dr. Berger, but stepped out at the last minute. Hackman would have set up a different and more powerful resonance in the father-son dynamic and resolution, but also might have overshadowed the actor who holds the film together, Timothy Hutton. It’s an amazing performance, and if Robert Redford “deserves” his directing Oscar, it’s for whatever he did to help Hutton in the role of the son coming back to life. Hutton is scared and twitchy at the start, but grows steadier and warmer and stronger. His scenes with Hirsch were shot in nine mere days, and they are the core of the performance in the movie that genuinely deserves to be called great.

As for Redford, he didn’t deserve the Oscar as Hutton deserved his. Scorsese and Polanski were nominated, and probably “deserved” one for the work they did, but so did David Lynch and Richard Rush (if you haven't seen "The Stunt Man" you're missing out). Redford really deserved a directing Oscar for "Quiz Show," however, his deft, sly, marvelous, subtle black comedy about the game show scandals of the 1950s, which was everything I mistook "Ordinary People" for at the time: a rich, complex, and ultimately unresolved story about truth and authenticity, about identity, and yes, love. Love of money, love of fame, love of celebrity. Even love and misunderstanding about and between a father and son—in this case, Mark Van Doren and his son Charles.

The problem with Guest’s story, as I see it now, is that the plot device of the boating accident doesn’t ring true. Not as backstory, but in the quasi-Classical, quasi-Freudian purpose it serves in the life of Conrad-as-hero. Hutton makes Conrad’s suicide very plausible, but I wish Guest’s book editor had directed her to make the circumstances that haunt Conrad the death of a very close friend. Every element in the novel and the movie adaptation would still work—and above all the character of Beth would work even better had her psychology been that of a mother frozen with love and grief and anger over nearly losing a son she didn’t actually lose. There would even be a homoerotic subtext to the passage through loss and love that leads to the (hetero)sexual awakening of Conrad. Some of this is there: the scenes with the other swimmers, the relationship between Conrad and Berger, the final clinch between Calvin and Conrad, the destruction of Beth. But as we have it now, it isn’t entirely real or authentic, even though it insistently calls itself ordinary.