The Talkies l Robert Redford's Feelings
Podhoretz, John
THE TALKIES ROBERT REDFORD'S FEELINGS by John Podhoretz Lake Forest, Illinois: front lawns, stately manses, red leaves blowing prettily across beautifully paved driveways, dark Mercedes-Benzes...
...She will not feel, she cannot feel...
...They have Freuded it up (in a flashback, Beth touches Bucky in an odd, suggestive way), they have made it elegant by setting it in the homes of the wealthy, and have made it more "sophisticated" by adding pointed touches of social commentary (a cocktail party sequence, in which the talk is all of stock-market figures and portfolios, presents us with many, many Beths, all of them most assuredly doing to their children what Beth is doing to hers, and not a one of them is interested in a single vital issue such as Redford's favorite, solar energy...
...The film is slow-paced, so that we can savor every golden word about "feeling" and the lack thereof...
...Conrad is not a well fellow...
...Conrad is slightly deranged, and why...
...The sound of Pachelbel's Canon in D, first on a piano, then sung by a chorus in fine voice...
...He does not know whose side to take in motherson fights...
...Beth is pure evil, but Conrad is a saint, in no way at all to blame for his brother's death, holding his difficulties in so as not to trouble anyone, even giving his mother all the benefit of the doubt that the monster does not deserve...
...Conrad Jarrett (for such is the boy's name) can do little but sing...
...And this is precisely what happens: Calvin, after 21 years of marriage, finally discovers that his wife is "not a feeling person," tells her this, and so away she goes in a taxi while Calvin and Conrad hug each other on the back patio, saying "I love you...
...What is it that the movie critics want...
...She stiffens and gazes straight ahead in astonishment when, under Dr...
...Conrad, too, feels guilty-so guilty, in fact, that he attempted to commit suicide a little while after his brother's death, and was then himself committed to a psychiatric hospital...
...For these critics, Mary Tyler Moore's superb performance as Beth (which is, if you care to look closely, and I do not blame you if you don't want to, an unerringly exact depiction of a certain kind of efficient, cold woman) is nothing next to Timothy Hutton's hysterical portrayal of Conrad as the son not of Calvin Jarrett, but of Anthony Perkins...
...And a particularly virulent piece of melodrama it is...
...What will save Conrad...
...Is it the kind of ''important study of the family today" that they say Ordinary People is or is it the black-and-white morality play, with suitable socialist commentary, that it really is...
...She is short-tempered and unfriendly with her son...
...Berger, Conrad's psychiatrist, tells him to feel, feel, feel ("I don't put much stock in dreams," he tells Conrad in the manner of a borscht-belt comic, as if spending precious time on dreams would distract the patient from the true issue, that of feeling), but Conrad is unable to express those feelings, even when his mother tells him she wishes he had died instead of Bucky...
...But still the movie comes out melodrama...
...Bucky, we learn, is the child Beth really loved, and she has blamed Conrad ever since for his brother's death (Conrad was with Bucky when the accident took place...
...Her husband, Conrad's father Calvin, is a milquetoast-albeit a highly successful milquetoast...
...Redford, WASP of Sun Valley, Idaho, and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, of course has nothing in common with these WASPs, since he cares about social issues (as the star of such films as All the President's Men and Brubaker and narrator of TV documentaries on the environment) and feeling and still pulls down $3 million per picture...
...Close-up on a nervous boy's face in the chorus, singing: Hallelujah...
...The pre-adolescent fantasy of every child, that he is adopted and that his mother has tied up his real parents in the front closet, comes blissfully true...
...What is the tragedy that has occurred...
...The dispassionate viewer of Ordinary People understands why this is: Her husband (played in the dullest possible way by Donald Sutherland) is a weakling whom she controls with the slightest twist of her finger, and her son is a martyred loon...
...Because of his mother...
...THE TALKIES ROBERT REDFORD'S FEELINGS by John Podhoretz Lake Forest, Illinois: front lawns, stately manses, red leaves blowing prettily across beautifully paved driveways, dark Mercedes-Benzes in those driveways...
...But there is hidden tragedy here, tragedy we can see clearly on that nervous boy's face...
...Redford has done both...
...Ordinary People is the first film to be directed by Robert Redford, America's reigning movie star and the WASP golden boy of every teenage girl's dreams...
...Berger's guidance, Conrad hugs his mother, trying to love her for what she is...
...She mildly tosses into a noisy garbage disposal a couple of pieces of French toast which Conrad says he does not feel like eating...
...She nearly has a fit when she learns that Conrad has dropped off the high-school swim team...
...John Podhoretz is editor of Counterpoint andfilm critic of The American Spectator...
...She is, perversely, more likable than Conrad or Calvin, and one hopes that now, rid of these two feeling types, she will be able to get in a peaceful round of her favorite game, golf...
...Redford and Sargent modify Hemingway's celebrated answer, and reply: Yes, they are more evil...
...Fitzgerald said: The rich are different from you and me...
...he has no appetite, is consumed with some mysterious guilt, has recently returned from an extended stay at some "hospital," and has odd scars on his wrists, which he covers all the time with heavy sweaters...
...Clearly, all's not right with these three ordinary people, and anxiously we await the murder of Beth, or the suicide of Conrad, or both...
...Upon his return home, he is fine on the outside, but on the inside what sinister selfimmolating forces are at work we can only guess...
...He knows there is an evil pawing at his family, but cannot say what it is, or will not say...
...It turns out that Bucky, Conrad's older brother, died in a boating accident about a year before the movie's action begins...
...Simple: Beth's death, or better yet, her spiritual death, her banishment from the house she loves and from the secure life she has so long struggled for...
...Berger, his kindly Jewish psychiatrist...
...There is another problem in the Jarrett household: Conrad's mother, Beth, who is unable to talk to her son, and who seems to harbor some sort of hatred for him...
...For the issue here is not love scorned, as it was in its predecessor, The Perils of Pauline, but is a mother's hatred of her child-an ugly and almost unbelievable subject at best...
...With this, dear readers, we enter into the country of Ordinary People, a country of WASPs and their $500,000 houses, their very attractive wives and very tall husbands...
...And, most important of all, it portrays the rich as characterless, heartless, empty, awful people, concerned only with interior decoration and cleanliness...
...He repeatedly says he loves his wife, loves his son, but cannot satisfy either...
...The praise the movie has received (four stars from those critics who award stars, raves from everyone else with the honorable exception of Pauline Kael, in the New Yorker) is the easily anticipated praise that any actor receives if he makes a suitably artsy, and politically correct, debut as a director...
...She does not want him to see Dr...
...There is no music in the film, a sure sign of serious intent, except for that brief moment at the beginning...
...Beth never went to see Conrad all those months when he was in the hospital, Beth wishes Conrad dead, Beth cannot even bear to pose for a family photograph with Conrad...
...What Redford and his scenarist, Alvin Sargent (author of two of the most abhorrent films of the 1970s, Bobby Deerfield, and Julia, for which he won an Oscar) have fashioned out of Judith Guest's best-selling novel is as blatant a story of good (Conrad and, to a lesser extent, Calvin) and evil (Beth) as that silent film classic, The Perils of Pauline, in which the villain tied beautiful Pauline to the railroad tracks...
...He seems to love his son, but cannot talk to him any more than his wife can, even though he tries...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
