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I still don’t think that Ordinary People deserved a few of its Oscar wins over Raging Bull, but it’s easy to see why this film was so beloved by voters. It’s not as boundary pushing as Scorsese’s character portrait, but it tells a simple, yet devastating, story of a well-to-do family disintegrating after the death of their oldest son. As an upper-class couple more concerned with appearances than properly displaying emotions, Ordinary People sees this family flailing about trying to kept it together, deal with the past, and move on from it.
The film mostly follows the exploits of the teenaged son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton, in his debut film role), as he returns home from an extended stay in a mental institution. Conrad is living under a dark cloud of guilt and is begging his parents to empathize and understand him. His father, Donald Sutherland, the only main member of the cast to not get Oscar nominated, which is a damn shame, meets him halfway and encourages his trips to see a therapist (Judd Hirsch) and deal with the past. It’s his mother (Mary Tyler Moore), a frigid woman more concerned with keeping up appearances than dealing with her anger or grief, who cannot deal with these ugly, vulnerable, naked emotions.
The film details these emotional standoffs and how these characters either sink or soar when they come into contact with them. Conrad goes into therapy to combat his paranoia and belief that his mother never loved him; she only ever loved his dead older brother. This fear of his is proven time and time again, not through words, but through her actions. She smiles politely, maintains an immaculate home, yet she cannot give any part of herself away to anyone. She is a sterile person incapable of emotions or vulnerability, and the way she shrinks away from these insights in a late-night passive aggressive fight with her husband is a marvel. Moore came up against the juggernaut of Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner’s Daughter come Oscar time, but she would have been a worthy winner.
Poor Sutherland, here he is giving a great performance as a man trying to support his son, searching within himself for the comforting words to say, for the right actions to take, and awkwardly fumbling around. One of the saddest things about Ordinary People is the slow burn in which he discovers that his marriage is a sham, a falsely built idol that he has never questioned until this very moment. His heart to heart with his son at the end of the film just reminded me of how undervalued Sutherland is an actor. How has he gone so consistently ignored by the Academy when he’s capable of tender, moving work like this?
But the film truly belongs to Hutton, who is painfully naturalistic to the point where some of his brooding scenes or an awkward attempt to reach outside of himself for help feel like a real person has been placed in front of a camera. That he was placed in the Supporting Actor category is a head spinning bit of category fraud. The scenes between him and the three veteran actors are all solid, and he develops a believable rapport with Hirsch’s therapist, but he’s even better with the two teenage girls in his life. Dinah Manoff is a girl he met while in the hospital, she seems aggressively cheerful in her one scene, like she’s trying to giddily run away from her depression instead of dealing with it head-on. While Elizabeth McGovern is his love interest, an open, honest girl from his choir class who is always straightforward with him. She also provides the sympathetic ear he so frequently needs. These two provide deeper insight into Hutton’s emotional state.
While Ordinary People may feel like prestige-picture, and maybe it is, but it’s also deeply moving, intelligent, and unafraid to engage in his characters who are all too human, in all of the highs and lows of what that means. It feels like a real, honest portrayal of a family moving on from a tragedy.
