Ordinary People

Director: Robert Redford

1980 / 124min / DCP

Redford’s first outing as director and by some reckonings his best was this delicate, affecting adaptation of a novel by Judith Guest. To the casual observer, the Jarretts family are as perfect as the manicured lawns in the tony suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, where they live, but deep fissures lay under this pristine surface. Son Conrad (Timothy Hutton) is haunted by his older brother’s accidental death, and the belief that his icily withholding mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore, marvelously cast against type), wishes that he’d died instead, while father, Calvin (Sutherland), is torn between grief and the family policy of repression. The rare Hollywood “prestige picture” that achieves genuine pathos.