Yes, this movie is depressing. But it is also moving and understated in a way that the book version is not.
Timothy Hutton plays an adolescent living in a North Shore suburb of Chicago who attempts suicide and spends some time in a mental hospital because he's depressed and has what many experts call survivor guilt. Put in lay terms, the character feels terrible about the death of his elder brother in a boating accident a while back, because everyone in the family knows (but doesn't want to come out and say) that the dead boy was Mom's favorite of the two. Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore play his parents; Meg Mundy shines in a supporting role as his grandmother, and Quinn Redeker (formerly of Days of Our Lives) has what amounts to a bit part as Timothy Hutton's uncle.
I would recommend this film primarily on the strength of these performances:
1. Timothy Hutton as the adolescent who attempts suicide.
2. Meg Mundy as the grandmother who does not realize that there is a profound difference between depression, survivor guilt, and simple surgery, and that she has a role in helping her grandson heal. (Her sole scene - helping daughter Mary Tyler Moore prepare a holiday meal - tells the viewer a great deal about where Mary Tyler Moore's character gets her attitudes. Moore makes reference to Hutton's visits to a psychiatrist, and Mundy makes a remark that lets the moviegoer know in no uncertain terms that she would just like to ignore the whole incident in the hope that it will all go away, and that she wonders out loud just why this whole thing wasn't done and over with months ago upon Hutton's release from the asylum.)
3. Mary Tyler Moore as the superficial mother who gives all of what little love she has to the son who died in the boating accident, and who leaves her marriage and remaining son rather than confront this fact about herself (namely, that she is very cold, shallow, and superficial and has very little love to give anyone). In one especially telling scene, one sees Moore in the dead son's bedroom, with a poignant, lost look on her face. Another, toward the end of the film, shows her admitting to her brother, without actually saying the words, that she preferred the dead son over the one who remained.
4. Judd Hirsch as the psychiatrist who provides followup psychiatric care on an outpatient basis to Hutton as he deals with his guilt feelings. Hirsch convinces moviegoers that his character truly cares about Hutton's, as is shown toward the beginning of the film in their first outpatient session; he makes it clear that although his sessions are the then-standard fifty minutes long, he will do everything in his power - up to and including turning his session timer away from the patient - to make sure the patient doesn't feel hurried or rushed.
ORDINARY PEOPLE also has a script which is written in relatively plain English. This alone makes the movie better than the book, which is written in that strange psychiatric foriegn language called psychobabble. In fact, the book is so deficient in this area that I had a hard time understanding what the author had to say; by way of contrast, although the scriptwriters lifted some dialogue verbatim from the book, they are able to clarify the plot and the characters' motivations to subtle perfection.
My only quibble, believe it or not, is with one of the performances - Donald Sutherland's. He portrays the father as the proverbial ninety-eight pound emotional weakling. This alone would make him difficult to relate to for many working-class moviegoers. Instead of getting violently angry with his wife, and showing it by destroying something or shouting loudly enough for the neighbors to hear - the reaction expected of men in the type of blue-collar environment in which I grew up - Sutherland's character weeps like a baby and then, when asked why he reacted the way he did, spouts off a string of psychobabble that sounds like it was written by the author of ORDINARY PEOPLE instead of the scriptwriters of the movie adaptation. Even for its time, this reaction would be beyond the understanding of many viewers. Sutherland is capable of acting in a much more traditionally masculine fashion without losing sensitivity in the process; he managed a similar feat in OUTBREAK.
This is not an action film. It's about the relationships in one family and how those relationships are blown apart by the death of one member of that family. Because it is generally so much better than the book from which it was adapted, I'd recommend seeing the movie and skipping the book, particularly if you're interested in learning about family dynamics and dysfunctions.
A suburban Chicago couple and their son are torn by another son's death. Oscars for best picture, director Robert Redford, supporting actor Hutton.More at HotMovieSale.com
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