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Ordinary People (1980)

Director: Robert Redford

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2 reviews

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

Time Out Film Guide

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User reviews of this film

Eddie said...

Posted on Apr 08 2010 15:45 Still the best directing job of Redford's career. Intimate, empathic, and alternately delicate and tough. Timothy Hutton is awesome as the genuine soul raging against the false, brittle world he is surrounded by.

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Anne said...

Posted on Jan 17 2010 23:47 Timothy Hutton's performance is devastating and beautiful. The film still holds up, 30 years later.

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