La Vie Quotidienne

SOMETHING IS WRONG in Lake Forest, Ill. A kid dies in a boating accident. His brother, Conrad, who was there when it happened, tries to kill himself. Later, he has nightmares, so he goes to see a psychiatrist. His father doesn't have nightmares, but he goes to see the psychiatrist too. Conrad's old girlfriend kills herself. Conrad gets better; his mother leaves his father. Pretty soon, we get the point--everyone here is getting divorced and seeing a psychiatrist and killing himself.

Ordinary People tires very hard to be a great movie, and because it tries so hard it succeeds very badly. I say this feelingly. Redford is earnest, and for this he must be respected; earnestness is a quality to be prized these days. But of course earnestness can't carry a movie--talent must be added somewhere, and vision. There is little of either to be found in Ordinary People. It is not so much a movie about depressed people as a movie that is depressed itself, a movie that sits alone in its room and stares at the ceiling for two hours. Simply a bad movie, perhaps; but out of respect for Redford's high purpose, I will call it a disaster.

These are genuinely ordinary people, as ordinary as real people could be, and their problems are ordinary. They are, as I said, depressed, which seems to be the most ordinary thing in the world. After all, who isn't? Some might argue that this is the problem with the movie--ordinary problems suggest little intrinsic interest. By contrast, Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle is, to all appearances, ordinary--a cabbie who falls in love with a campaign worker--but he is intrinsically interesting because he is psychotic, and of dark aspect, and when the camera rolls the heads start to roll, too. Still, watching newsreels of Arthur Bremer would not be art; on the other side, in the hands of a genius everything is interesting, including ordinary people. You have to let the artist treat what he would--you could say, "Don't make a movie about bores," but you couldn't justify it.

Indeed, the people of The Seagull are pretty much the same as those in Ordinary People, mutatis mutandis. Redford, though, is not Chekhov. The purpose of art of this sort is to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary--this he has failed to do. He brings little in the way of creativity or technical resources to his film, only a lot of self-conscious artiness which he takes to its furthest extremes, directorial touches which never coalesce. It all starts with the opening credits, white letters on black background, no sound: "Oh, Christ," you think--"not another American Bergman." Throughout, Redford blunders like the typical autodidact, smothering whatever intuitions he might have about film with a congeries of tony cliches: an aerial shot of a breakfast table, for example, or a shot of a license plate as the family car pulls into the garage.

Generally, the actors survive their director. Donald Sutherland presents the essence of the WASP lawyer, a martini with legs, without becoming a cartoon; Timothy Hutton is impressive throughout, although distanced somewhat by his technique, and reminiscent in his mannerisms, of James Dean. When the actors do lapse, though, they look like they're auditioning for a Method class in the Village, and this can probably be chalked up to Redford.

THEN THERE IS a huge hole in the center of Ordinary People, and her name is Mary Tyler Moore. Here, in the mother, we are supposed to find the motive force behind all the problems of the son and father, and, by extension, everybody. Moore (Tyler Moore?) does nothing with it. She's not allowed to show any emotions--cold WASP bitch--but she doesn't even evince any humanity. So she drifts through the movie like a white zombie. When her big scene comes at the end (Sutherland has just told her he no longer loves her), she is not so much an emotionally overwrought woman as a dead ringer for Katherine Hepburn at her most palsied.

But what's a woman to do? Alvin Sargent's screenplay doesn't give her much of a chance. The mother represents a world that is inhumanly (and not very artfully) satirized throughout Ordinary People. She is a caricature--she hates her son for spilling his blood on her clean towels--so it's hard to take her or the conflicts she causes seriously. A great actress, and nothing less than a great actress, might have transcended her lines, brought something to the movie that was never there to begin with. Then again, greatness is quite a lot for a screenwriter to expect, especially when he is himself so doggedly mediocre.

The mother's characterization is the biggest problem with Sargent's screenplay, but not the only one. He and Redford try to work with symbols--the silver napkin rings, a doorbell, a lack of pets in the house, a broken plate--details that fail to accumulate, leaving a mess. It's all too obvious; just so the dialogue:

I didn't play golf today. I didn't play. It was too cold.

How was your golf game?

I didn't play.

Yeah, I guess it got cold, huh?

I got a 74 on a trig quiz.

74, huh? I was terrible at Trig.

You took Trig?

Did I take Trig?

The mother and the son can't communicate--get it? There is no surer sign of an amateur than this sort of narrative intrusion; Ordinary People goes, not from situations to ideas, but from ideas to illustrations. Sargent and Redford might as well come in front of the proscenium and tell us what they're thinking. We'd all get home a lot sooner.

Ordinary People is based on the Judith Guest novel of the same name, the message of which, according to people I know who have read it, is that it's never anyone's fault; and for "it," fill in the blank. A variation on "Guilt is not a constructive emotion," it would seem to work well in therapy, or as well as anything else, and on this level it should be appreciated. It is not the stuff of art. Among other things, life is a little more complicated than that, and one of the complications is that our existence itself is always somebody's fault, and not only when Daddy forgets to go to the drugstore.

ON ANOTHER LEVEL, it raises the question of "Film vs. Freud," whether therapy should be the subject matter of movies. Well, it's dangerous: remember Interiors? Whether or not, in these matters, the patient should minister to himself, it's certainly better for art when he does. Watching most psychotherapy in action is not all that different from watching a colostomy, or any other doctor-work; among other things, it makes for lousy dialogue, and Ordinary People is full of it, endless psychobabbled colloquys between Conrad and his psychiatrist (Jewish, of course) who smokes cigarettes, drinks bottomless cups of coffee, wears shawl-collared cardigans to the office, and agrees to be Conrad's "friend" for 50 bucks an hour. It seems as if Redford should be satirizing this too, all these people saying "Do you want to talk about it?"; satirize the dumb kid who wants to kill himself as well, if it weren't too cruel--but no, he likes easy targets, WASPishness, the swimming coach.

Twice in the movie, Conrad picks up a paperback copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, inviting unwelcome comparisons with a more successful American epic, in which Hunter Thompson makes as much sense as you could of the heart disease in the thorax of the American Dream. There is little of Fear and Loathing in Ordinary People, only a bizarre hope of salvation through psychiatry and a blissfully naive belief in the power of love. Clearly, something is really wrong, not only in Lake Forest, Ill., but in America. Yet nobody seems to know exactly what it is that's wrong, and American movies are doing little to help us. Ordinary People is among them. It is a movie of adolescent concerns.