It feels so strange to tell someone that “Ordinary People” is my favorite movie. It’s like saying a hurricane is my favorite natural disaster, leukemia my favorite medical diagnosis. The film is just so hard, so painful and devastating and truthful. There is barely a false note to be found. To say that the 1980 movie about a Midwestern family caught in a slow-burn crisis “hit close to home” is a vast understatement. The movie knew my address. It ran its fingers over the brushed velvet stripes of our living-room wallpaper. It listened in on our conversations and recorded, especially, what was unspoken, silent.

And it was directed by Robert Redford! The archetypal ’70s and ’80s Hollywood leading man himself: the looks, the quiet grace, the down-home golden-haired cowboy baseball journalist American thing of him. And yet here he was also, crushing it from behind the camera with this nuanced, exquisite family drama that I only have the strength to watch every decade or so. Robert Redford made a nearly perfect movie.

Last night I wrote to my sister that I didn’t know Robert Redford could die. And it really wasn’t hyperbole. I just had never thought of the man departing our midst. Robert Redford just was. And of course in a certain way he hasn’t died and he never will. He will persist in pop-culture gems like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Natural” and his conservation work and the Sundance Film Festival; but none of them more profound or impacting than the sweet pain of a Lake Forest family falling apart. The movie is so universal and real that, in a way, maybe it knows where all of us live.

In America’s review from October of 1980, Richard Blake, S.J., captures the film wonderfully, though I would add one thing. While Judd Hirsch and Timothy Hutton are indeed splendid, Mary Tyler Moore as a mother whose grief doesn’t know where to go is stunning. – Joe Hoover, S.J.

“Deep down things,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us, dwells “the dearest freshness.” Deep down dwells at times a pain too sharp to endure or an emptiness too terrifying to admit. In fear, or hope, some turn to God, some to psychiatry. Others develop elaborate strategies for living on surfaces, like motes on a bubble. For them survival depends on not looking deep down things.

“Ordinary People,” the brilliant directorial debut of actor Robert Redford, chronicles the strategy of retreat. On the surface the Jarretts are an ideal family. Calvin (Donald Sutherland), a tax attorney, has provided a beautiful home in Lake Forest, Il., an elegant suburb of Chicago. Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) plays golf and tennis at the club, shops at the right stores and socializes with only the right kind of people. Their son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton) is handsome, a member of the swimming team and glee club and will not have to worry about tuition bills at either Harvard or Michigan.

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The appearances of tranquility are deceptive. Conrad has spent six months in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt. An older brother was killed in a boating accident, and Conrad blames himself. Death and blame cannot be discussed. Beth did not weep at the funeral, and, in fact, was cleareyed enough to correct her husband’s choice of clothes for the burial. She lives in a world of perfectly dusted living rooms and perfectly folded napkins, and nothing must disturb the illusion of order, not even death or hatred. Calvin, in turn, is a middle-aged cheerleader. If he says “That’s great!” often enough, he will begin to believe it.

Conrad has scars on his wrists and memories of the hospital; he knows something is wrong. On his own, he calls Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch), and together they begin to poke and probe the Jarretts’ Better Homes and Gardens world. There is progress, and the change in Conrad prompts his father to visit Dr. Berger. Beth will not discuss the matter. As they argue the matter in a fashionable restaurant, she smiles at the waitress to assure herself that the appearances remain. At the end of the conversation, she has her way. They will go to Houston for a golf vacation, leaving Conrad with Beth’s mother. One afternoon on the 18th green, she states quite defiantly that nothing matters to her but her own happiness.

The rich reds and golds of the autumn landscape and the polished woods of the dining room entomb the Jarretts in a china closet of pain. Privilege of birth and wealth have made them objects to be viewed from without, like a Belleek tea service. They, especially Beth, are fragile, and once removed from the shelf, they know that they risk shattering those delicate surfaces: Conrad in the clutter of the doctor’s office, Calvin as he jogs to the point of exhaustion in the woods and Beth, by contrast, as she fights to maintain her existence behind those glass, dust-proof doors until she can find another sanctuary.

The performances, especially by Judd Hirsch and Timothy Hutton, are splendid. The baroque music, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch, captures the elegance and perfection of Jarretts’ world, and the script by Alvin Sargent, an adaptation of the novel by Judith Guest, is deadly as it shows characters speaking without communicating. — Richard A. Blake, S.J., Oct. 18, 1980

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