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Bookmark this pageOrdinary People (1980)
Director: Robert Redford
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Any movie starring the all-American dream mum Mary Tyler Moore as a neurotic, domineering mother, papering over the cracks as her husband and son go to pieces, should get ten out of ten. Unfortunately, Robert Redford's super-tasteful movie (from the novel by Judith Guest) uses her pixie grin as its only effective irony. For the rest, it's a scrupulously observed affluent American psychodrama that wishes it was Chekhov: tinged with autumn leaves, and following the cocktail party, the golfing holiday, the school swimming race, it peels away the happy smile of these 'ordinary people', plunged into misery after the death of one son and the breakdown of another. 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. DMacp.Author: DMacp
Cast & crew
Director: Robert Redford
Producer: Donald L Schwary
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, Timothy Hutton, M Emmet Walsh, Elizabeth McGovern, Dinah Manoff, James B Sikking full cast
Duration: 124 mins
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