Ordinary People

Each character in this movie is given the dramatic opportunity to look inside himself, to question his own motives as well as the motives of others, and to try to improve his own ways of dealing with a troubled situation. Two of the characters do learn how to adjust; the third doesn't. It's not often we get characters who face those kinds of challenges on the screen, nor directors who seek them out. Ordinary People is an intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving film. Read full review

A moving, intelligent and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them. Not since Robert Benton's "Kramer vs. Kramer" has there been a movie that so effectively catches the look, sound and temper of a particular kind of American existence. Read full review

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself. This is not very show-bizzy stuff, but for once, a movie star has used his power to create not light entertainment or a trendy political statement, but a work that addresses itself quietly and intelligently to issues everyone who attempts to raise children must face. Read full review

A powerfully intimate domestic drama, Ordinary People represents the height of craftsmanship across the board. Read full review

Wonderful performances by Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton. [19 Dec 1980, p.2-10]

It is nearly impossible to look at this brilliantly executed movie without being moved to tears. Read full review

It never exploits its characters or demands their way of living. For all the hidden misery it uncovers, it remains compassionate and humane from first scene to last. Read full review

An outstanding start to the fall season, reassuring in its quest for excellence and its deep concern for the family. It's a fine and touching piece of work for any season; in 1980, it is rain after drought. [21 Sept 1980, T1]

If the film has a problem, it's a kind of excess of goodness at the expense of imaginative excitement. The real hero is the psychiatrist, played with a riffing Jewish beat by Hirsch as a counterpoint to the tight Wasp rhythms of Conrad's family. There's a feeling of therapy more than revelation, but perhaps for our multifariously sick society therapy has become revelation. This seems to have been a major point in Guest's novel, and Redford has dramatized it with integrity, honor and compassion. [22 Sept 1980, p.76]

Moore's conception of the character is compelling. She rivets us. She's assisted by the superb performances Redford has elicited from her co- stars, Sutherland and Timothy Hutton, who plays Conrad, the guilt-ridden surviving brother of the dead boy. [26 Sep 1980]

The story of a boy's re-entry into family and school life after a mental breakdown, it is of strikingly high quality. Redford apparently has a fine eye, and the ability to draw the very best from veteran actors Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland, as well as from a youngster, Timothy Hutton. The entire cast, to the smallest parts, are excellent. And the dialogue, costumes and settings are so perfectly appropriate that they approach satire. [26 Sept 1980, p.17]

This is thoughtful and beautifully observed work, from the social backdrop and the tell-me-what-you're-feeling analysis sessions to the painful performances including Mary Tyler Moore playing against type as the chillingly repressed mother. Read full review

An actors' movie and an advert for therapy, extremely bitter, but handsomely directed in its elegant pretentiousness, it leaves you the impression that Redford is, despite it all, as cuddly as a teddy-bear. Read full review

Whatever social statement Ordinary People was making about its time has evaporated during the intervening years, leaving behind an open, honest drama lacking the emotional punch that would make it unforgettable today. Ordinary People should be devastating, but it's not. By any standards, it's still a good movie, but three decades have stripped away any pretense of greatness. [21 Feb 1999] Read full review

Although the story is admittedly slight, Redford demonstrates a tremendous understanding of his subjects, wealthy white suburbanites who struggle to conceal the rage and fear that eats away at them. His quiet, gentle direction is epitomized in memorably painful moments, such as the famous photo scene, when the squelched feelings threaten to explode. Read full review

The film is an admirable argument for the legitimacy of psychotherapy, especially for the time, played out in an affluent Chicago suburb. Read full review

Given the source material, the film is as good as respectful adaptation could make it: a high-class soap opera, compulsively watchable despite a quality of insight eventually exposed as trite and dubious in the extreme. [26 Sep 1980, p.F1]

The film looks austere and serious, rather as if it had been shot inside a Frigidaire, and the oppressiveness of the images tends to strangle laughter, even at the most absurd excesses of Alvin Sargent's script. Read full review