Ordinary People (1980)

The best picture from 81 left me a little cold. I was with it for most of the movie but then one crucial moment left me wishing the whole thing were different.

The basic idea is that Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) and Calvin (Donald Sutherland) had two sons, Buck and Conrad (Timothy Hutton), but Buck (the eldest) dies tragically in a boat accident (before the action of the movie), which Conrad survives. Beth loved Buck intensely but can't really stand Conrad. Conrad, being the youngest and full of guilt about the accident and surviving the accident and his mother's indifference toward him, tries to kill himself, fails, ends up in a hospital for a few months, but is now back in school and in therapy with Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch).

The movie is well acted and Hutton is especially wonderful. But, and here's a spoiler, I wanted Beth to realize her arrogance and hurtful nature and change. At the critical moment where she goes into the bedroom to pack her bag to leave her husband and son when she has that moment where she might completely break down and let herself feel something, I was so hoping she would just have an Angelina Jolie in A Might Heart moment and just wail. But she doesn't. She leaves her family in favor of the pastel golfing vacation of Texas. I just felt like the whole movie was about these people (who are a little too privileged to be "ordinary") dealing with the death of a son/brother and the two more obviously vulnerable people, Calvin and Conrad, trying to help the one who was obviously the most hurt, Beth, and each one has an epiphany in his own way except Beth. She never deals with it but instead goes on in her stick up her ass manner.

Maybe I'll appreciate it more as I get away from it and I understand not having Beth break down--to save it from being unbearably sappy--but I do think there could have been an intelligent way to show us that she's dealing with it. Oh well. It's worth seeing but I do wish it were different.

And, random note, I think Liv Tyler stole her whole being from Elizabeth McGovern.