Families can go along for years without ever facing the underlying problems in their

relationships. But sometimes a tragedy can bring everything out in the open, all of
sudden and painfully, just when everyone's most vulnerable. Robert Redford's
“Ordinary People” begins at a time like that for a family that loses its older son in a
boating accident. That leaves three still living at home in a perfectly manicured
suburban existence, and the movie is about how they finally have to deal with the ways
they really feel about one another.
There's the surviving son, who always lived in his big brother's shadow, who tried to
commit suicide after the accident, who has now just returned from a psychiatric
hospital. There's the father, a successful Chicago attorney who has always taken the love
of his family for granted. There's the wife, an expensively maintained, perfectly
groomed, cheerful homemaker whom "everyone loves." The movie begins just as all of
this is falling apart.
The movie's central problems circle almost fearfully around the complexities of love.
The parents and their remaining child all "love" one another, of course. But the father's
love for the son is sincere yet also inarticulate, almost shy. The son's love for his mother
is blocked by his belief that she doesn't really love him, she only loved the dead brother.
And the love between the two parents is one of those permanent facts that both take for
granted and neither has ever really tested.
“Ordinary People” begins with this three-way emotional standoff and develops it
through the autumn and winter of one year. And what I admire most about the film is
that it really does develop its characters and the changes they go through. So many
family dramas begin with a "problem" and then examine its social implications in that
frustrating semifactual, docudrama format that's big on TV. “Ordinary People” isn't a
docudrama; it's the story of these people and their situation, and it shows them doing
what's most difficult to show in fiction, it shows them changing, learning, and growing.
At the center of the change is the surviving son, Conrad, played by a wonderfully natural
young actor named Timothy Hutton. He is absolutely tortured as the film begins; his life
is ruled by fear, low self-esteem, and the correct perception that he is not loved by his
mother. He starts going to a psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch) after school. Things are hard for
this kid. He blames himself for his brother's death. He's a semi-outcast at school
because of his suicide attempt and hospitalization. He does have a few friends, a girl he
met at the hospital, and another girl who stands behind him at choir practice and who
would, in a normal year, naturally become his girlfriend. But there's so much turmoil at
home.