From the Archives: A film out of the ordinary by Redford

Television ordinarily has a conspicuous and fanfared fall season — conspicuous this year because with the exception of “Shogun” it didn’t show up and may well arrive wearing sleigh bells.

The movies never have made quite so much of their fall season, but year after year Labor Day is the Great Divide between the high-action, low-nutrition potboilers of summer and the more substantial stuff that is likely to show up in any consideration of the year’s best work. Labor Day may be a knell for sun worshipers but for the film buff it often arrives as a great relief.

Film’s fall season arrives this week with at least a half-dozen items of more than routine interest, including the newest Woody Allen comedy, titled at the last minute “Stardust Memories.” Among the others are a Bette Midler concert film, “Divine Madness” (reviewed by Kevin Thomas), directed by Michael Ritchie (“The Candidate,” “Downhill Racer”); pop singer Paul Simon’s first outing as a filmmaker, “One Trick Pony”; Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson in “Hopscotch,” a merry and international tale in which Matthau starts to tell all about the CIA and then takes off to avoid being silenced the hard way; Charles Bronson caught up in the dilemma of illegal Mexican immigration in “Borderline”; and Robert Redford making his debut as a non-acting director in a strongly emotional and beautifully written and performed family drama, “Ordinary People.”

More on the first five (and any late starters) as the week goes on. Just now, the film in view is Redford’s assured and affecting adaptation of Judith Guest’s bestselling novel about the rending of a complacently happy upper-middle-class family.

Like every actor-turned-director I can think of from Olivier forward, Redford is at his best working with his fellow actors to evoke performances of sensitivity and believability over a wide emotional range. “Ordinary People” is entirely a film of performance, which is obviously what attracted Redford to the novel in galley form, well before it had been established as a commercial success.

Donald Sutherland is a very prosperous Chicago tax attorney living well in the posh North Shore suburb of Lake Forest. His wife is Mary Tyler Moore, who at a very misleading first glance is simply a more mature version of the effervescent helpmate on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” They have had two teenage sons, but a few months before the events of the film the elder son drowned during a sudden storm on a lake. The younger son, tensely and sympathetically played by Timothy Hutton (the son of the late Jim Hutton), has attempted suicide, been hospitalized and, as we meet him, is home again, shakily trying to resume his place in the ordinary world.

“Ordinary People,” written by Alvin Sargent (“Julia”) from the Guest novel, is both subtle and emotionally very suspenseful. From the start, there is no doubt how dangerously fragile the boy is, self-accusing (he survived the fatal capsizing) and too bright not to know when he is being coddled and patronized, and not merely guilt-ridden or paranoid when he senses a new cool distance between himself and his mother (whose elder son was manifestly her favorite).

The suspense, of course, is whether the boy, in touch with no one, finding comfort from no one, will again try to destroy himself. The tone of the film allows no easy assurance that things will work out. Life is not necessarily benign.

But if the boy is the focal point of the story and the suspense, much more is going on, and in particular the unmasking of the mother. Redford has said there are no villains in the piece, which is true enough, but there are three incredibly complex human beings, the mother most complicated of all, constructing façades of tidy perfection to conceal a tangle of fears and resentments and an ice-like core.

Having been cheerfully intelligent through two long-running series, Mary Tyler Moore creates a character who is hatefully self-centered, infuriating in her rigid failure to help her wounded son and finally pitiable in her inability to deal with love as a gift to be given or received. She was an inspired choice for the role by Redford because the audience, like her fictional family, has to re-see her, in a rising disbelief that this Mrs. All-America must have been related to the Little Foxes on her mother’s side. It’s a stunning portrayal.

Sutherland is the nice guy — far from sappy or weak — who imagines that natural ability plus hard work and fidelity earn their own rewards, including a loving family and a sprawling colonial pile on the North Shore. He figures out only a little more slowly than the audience where the source of the trouble is, and he is truly poignant in his anguish over his unreachable son’s awful pain and then over the death of a love around which he had constructed his life.

The boy on his own takes himself to a hospital-recommended psychiatrist — Judd Hirsch, playing with a brusque warmth that is, I presume, just what the patient ordered, supportive but not patronizing. The production notes suggest that Guest had neither been in analysis nor studied up on it, but the interplay sounds just right — all those questions answered by other questions. It may even be that these scenes have their origins as much in cinema as in medical texts, but it is, if so, a later screen view of psychiatry or psychoanalysis, making the doctor neither an accented villain nor a presto change-o miracle worker, finding the secret word that erases all the pain and paralysis. It’s not even clear that Hirsch is getting through to the boy at all, or vice versa.

“Ordinary People” belongs to the quartet, but there are good portrayals by M. Emmet Walsh as a swim coach trying to be understanding (and failing), Dinah Manoff as a friend from the mental hospital, Fredric Lehne as a high school pal and, most outstandingly, Elizabeth McGovern as a girl in the high school chorus who appears willing to accept the boy as he is.

Young Hutton’s role was the more difficult because it was so consistently down and tense, no relieving capers, no manic episodes. But he invites both fascination and empathy and there’s never any doubt that he is worth heroic measures to save. It is a portrayal his father would have been very proud of indeed.

Redford’s direction is by no means perfect. In the early going particularly, the positioning of the camera seems a bit self-conscious, overhead shots, floor-level shots that draw attention to the placing of the camera.

More troubling as judgment calls are the repeated flashbacks to the drowning scene, and the reprise at a climactic moment of some dialogue we had heard earlier. The vocal reprise simply nudges the audience to remember what it remembers vividly enough; the flashbacks draw attention again to technique, undermining the forward impulse and believability of the drama.

But those cavils are minor, measured alongside the achievement of Redford’s “Ordinary People.” As an intimate and demanding family drama (demanding on the creators and on the audience}, it was both a brave choice and a wise one — wiser, say, than a large-scale and logistically difficult first film would have been. It was also an admirable choice, using the power and perquisites of Redford’s stardom to bring into being the kind of film that might well have had hard going under other auspices.

“Ordinary People,” which opens Friday at the Bruin and is rated R for language, is an outstanding start to the fall season, reassuring in its quest for excellence and its deep concern for the family. It is a fine and touching piece of work for any season; in 1980, it is rain after drought.