Ordinary People 1980

The Film:

The 80s comes in with a whimper with this one. It's another "family issues" film and one I've seen before, a while ago. I remember quite liking it, but only in the way that I quite like that sort of thing to pass some time on an afternoon in half term when there's nothing else on the telly.

It's generally best remembered these days as the film that denied Scorsese his rightful award when he was at his peak (it was a long time after this before he actually got anything). The Director award instead went to Robert Redford for this, his directorial debut.

As I said, from what I remember it's quite a good film - but not really my ideal pick just one week after watching Kramer vs Kramer. I'm prepared to be proved wrong - but I fear that this is going to come across as overwrought, very dated and a little bit boring. We'll see....

The Ceremony:

Contrary to what it says on the poster, the ceremony actually took place the day after, on March 31st. This was because of the assassination attempt on then President Ronald Regan (which was motivated by an obsession with future Oscar winner Jodie Foster). It was hosted by Johnny Carson and ran to 3 hours and 13 minutes.

Interesting statistics include the fact that all four acting winners that night were under 40, including Timothy Hutton who, at 20, was the youngest Supporting Actor winner. Eva Le Gallienne was nominated for Supporting Actress and, born in 1899, was the last actor born in the 19th Century to receive a nomination. It's also, at the time of writing, the earliest awards from which all nominated Directors are still alive (although, as three are now in their 80s and the other two in their 70s, I'm guessing this bit won't be true for very much longer!)



Other Notable Winners That Night:

Bobby and Sissy

The other two heavily nominated films that year were Raging Bull and The Elephant Man with eight each. However, The Elephant Man won nothing and Raging Bull took just two, for Best Editing and the Best Actor award for Robert de Niro. The aforementioned Timothy Hutton beat his co-star Judd Hirsch to Best Supporting Actor (to be fair, they were by far the best two in the film!) and Sissy Spacek, best known to most as Carrie, won for Coal Miner's Daughter. Mary Steenburgen took the fourth acting award.

The fact that The Elephant Man went home empty handed prompted several people to argue that make up artist Christopher Tucker (also famous for creating the look of the Phantom in the original stage musical!) should have received something for his work on the film. The following year the award for "Best Make Up" was introduced. Tucker never won the award, although he was credited as "Make Up Consultant" on Quest for Fire, the film that won it two years later

Best Song:

I'm not going to argue with this one - one of my favourites of all time! I got rather obsessed with this song a couple of years later when it topped the charts in the UK, off the back of the TV series (which I was also rather obsessed with!) Oh, and you see that one with the curly hair who's music it is? I'm friends with him on Facebook and we have a dinner date planned for next May....

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Oi, Redford, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough!

It really shouldn't have been Ordinary People. Particularly as an angsty family drama won the year before. The other options were Tess (I studied the book for A Level and was pretty underwhelmed by the film), The Elephant Man (very mainstream for Lynch, but maybe not enough for Oscar), Coal Miner's Daughter (possibly a bit niche?) - and the one that pretty much everyone these days reckons should have won both Best Picture and Best Director - Raging Bull. It's the one that's stood the test of time, in terms of acting, directing and overall story. It's not a personal favourite - I appreciate it rather than like it! - and I'm happy to have just the two boxing films that we've got on our list. However, it really should have won.


Our Verdict:

Classic dinner scene. A staple of many family dramas.
(Come back in 1999 for an almost identical screenshot!)

The plot is fairly thin and pretty straightforward. Older son Buck dies tragically, younger son Conrad (who survived the accident) is guilt-ridden and suicidal. His parents make a complete mess of dealing with the whole thing.

I do need to be careful here. Ordinary People is incredibly underwhelming (you could say, ordinary) but it's really not as bad as I'm in danger of suggesting. When I first watched it a few years back, I quite liked it. However, when you hold it up against other winners (and the other nominees that year) it becomes far less impressive.

Sitcom star in dramatic role - example number one.

All that aside, this is a good film. It's very much about a particular time and place and group of people - it's an upper-middle-class suburban American family in the late seventies. There's a certain coldness about the whole setting, including the characters, that I find equally fascinating and off putting at the same time. On one hand the characters seem authentic in their coldness - trying hard to present the right social image as their (completely inappropriate) way of trying to deal with tragedy. The dinner party scene is superb, expertly showing the plastic pointlessness of the lives they lead in the light of the death of their son - whilst suggesting that it's only really us, the viewers, that can see the futility of the whole thing.

Sitcom star in dramatic role - example number two!

However, on the other hand, the coldness of the characters - particularly Conrad's parents - meant that I never ever warmed to them. I'm guessing that we're not really supposed to warm very much to Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) but I would have liked to have felt some sympathy towards her as a grieving mother. However, I really couldn't care less by the end of the film. Calvin (Donald Sutherland) is a bit more sympathetic, but incredibly bland. So, again, I really didn't feel their pain or sympathise with their situation at all.

Yet again, the kids make more sense than the adults -
even the ones that are struggling with life

Timothy Hutton, playing Conrad, is superb - and fully deserved his Oscar. His character is well written and very well acted and, sadly, still incredibly relevant given the increasing suicide rate among young men today. He's the heart of the film and it's very easy to feel for him and everything he's going through. The scenes with his therapist (Judd Hirsch) are very good, as are the (too few) scenes with the other two women in his life, Jeaninne and Karen (both friendships ultimately doomed, for different reasons). I think maybe the strength of the relationships Conrad has outside his family is there to highlight quite how wrong things are going at home. However, it all just makes me like Beth and Calvin even less.

It's not a bad film - and there are some very good things about it. But it ended up leaving me nearly as cold as Conrad's parents.