The Talkies l Robert Redford's Feelings

...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...

...He does not know whose side to take in motherson fights...

...John Podhoretz is editor of Counterpoint andfilm critic of The American Spectator...

...Conrad is slightly deranged, and why...

...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...

...She does not want him to see Dr...

...Her husband, Conrad's father Calvin, is a milquetoast-albeit a highly successful milquetoast...

...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...

...What is the tragedy that has occurred...

...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...

...The film is slow-paced, so that we can savor every golden word about "feeling" and the lack thereof...

...What is it that the movie critics want...

...She mildly tosses into a noisy garbage disposal a couple of pieces of French toast which Conrad says he does not feel like eating...

...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...

...There is no music in the film, a sure sign of serious intent, except for that brief moment at the beginning...

...Because of his mother...

...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...

...Redford has done both...

...The sound of Pachelbel's Canon in D, first on a piano, then sung by a chorus in fine voice...

...Berger's guidance, Conrad hugs his mother, trying to love her for what she is...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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 will save Conrad...

...Redford and Sargent modify Hemingway's celebrated answer, and reply: Yes, they are more evil...

...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...

...It turns out that Bucky, Conrad's older brother, died in a boating accident about a year before the movie's action begins...

...Conrad is not a well fellow...

...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...

...Berger, his kindly Jewish psychiatrist...

...He repeatedly says he loves his wife, loves his son, but cannot satisfy either...

...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...

...She stiffens and gazes straight ahead in astonishment when, under Dr...

...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...

...And a particularly virulent piece of melodrama it is...

...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...

...He knows there is an evil pawing at his family, but cannot say what it is, or will not say...

...Conrad Jarrett (for such is the boy's name) can do little but sing...

...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...

...She will not feel, she cannot feel...

...But there is hidden tragedy here, tragedy we can see clearly on that nervous boy's face...

...But still the movie comes out melodrama...

...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...

...He seems to love his son, but cannot talk to him any more than his wife can, even though he tries...

...She is short-tempered and unfriendly with her son...

...And, most important of all, it portrays the rich as characterless, heartless, empty, awful people, concerned only with interior decoration and cleanliness...

...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...

...Close-up on a nervous boy's face in the chorus, singing: Hallelujah...

...Fitzgerald said: The rich are different from you and me...

...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...

...She nearly has a fit when she learns that Conrad has dropped off the high-school swim team...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...