Ordinary People
Jul. 26th, 2009 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceruseeWatching Ordinary People, the famous 1980 film for which Timothy Hutton earned an Oscar; I'd never seen it before.
How weird, to see Hutton in this. I saw Moore first in The Dick Van Dyke Show, and then in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and of course she's older here, but that's what people do; they get older. Sutherland is stranger, because I've only ever seen him as an older man, and here he's just middle aged, but it's not the hardest leap, to take twenty years off of an old man.
But Hutton...I've only seen a three-decades older Hutton, the incredibly able Hutton, with his charisma, his presence, the fine command of dialogue and deliberate body language: all in the vehicle of an middle-aged body, a deeper, rougher voice, a face that is quite attractive, but also lined and lived-in. This teenage Hutton is shocking to me, because he is instantly recognizable as the youthful version of that man; you recognize him at the first sentence, the first facial quirk. The mannerisms and the voice are the same as the adult version; the body is so incredibly young. How is this smooth-faced, light-voiced child this good of an actor? It seems only fair that a man Hutton's age can do what Hutton can do, with all those years of practice, but how is he here so good, so young? I can't believe my eyes.
...
There's a scene, near the middle of Ordinary People, in which Beth Jarrett, Moore's character, wanders out into the chilly yard to talk with her son Conrad. We have already seen that there is no intimacy between mother and son, and they strain to connect somehow; Conrad reaches for childhood memories--a pigeon that used to nest on Beth's car and frighten her, a dog that Conrad and his brother wanted when they were young--but Beth is uncomfortable with the note of discontent in Conrad's recollections, and the conversation quickly implodes; she retreats back into the house, abandoning her tentative effort at being a parent to her surviving son. It's very powerful, and it's a microcosm of the film; symbolic of everything wrong with the Jarretts, everything that Beth has withheld from her family. It's beautifully played--the ambiguous, wistful longing from both parties, the inevitability of their failure to make a connection, Conrad's pain, Beth's unwillingness to make anything but the most superficial acknowledgement of his existance. Her token gestures of motherhood--telling Conrad to work harder at swimming, to wear his jacket in the cold--are revealed as meaningless by her total inability to share a single moment of emotional honesty with her suffering son. It's quietly, almost gently heartbreaking, all this failure.
How weird, to see Hutton in this. I saw Moore first in The Dick Van Dyke Show, and then in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and of course she's older here, but that's what people do; they get older. Sutherland is stranger, because I've only ever seen him as an older man, and here he's just middle aged, but it's not the hardest leap, to take twenty years off of an old man.
But Hutton...I've only seen a three-decades older Hutton, the incredibly able Hutton, with his charisma, his presence, the fine command of dialogue and deliberate body language: all in the vehicle of an middle-aged body, a deeper, rougher voice, a face that is quite attractive, but also lined and lived-in. This teenage Hutton is shocking to me, because he is instantly recognizable as the youthful version of that man; you recognize him at the first sentence, the first facial quirk. The mannerisms and the voice are the same as the adult version; the body is so incredibly young. How is this smooth-faced, light-voiced child this good of an actor? It seems only fair that a man Hutton's age can do what Hutton can do, with all those years of practice, but how is he here so good, so young? I can't believe my eyes.
...
There's a scene, near the middle of Ordinary People, in which Beth Jarrett, Moore's character, wanders out into the chilly yard to talk with her son Conrad. We have already seen that there is no intimacy between mother and son, and they strain to connect somehow; Conrad reaches for childhood memories--a pigeon that used to nest on Beth's car and frighten her, a dog that Conrad and his brother wanted when they were young--but Beth is uncomfortable with the note of discontent in Conrad's recollections, and the conversation quickly implodes; she retreats back into the house, abandoning her tentative effort at being a parent to her surviving son. It's very powerful, and it's a microcosm of the film; symbolic of everything wrong with the Jarretts, everything that Beth has withheld from her family. It's beautifully played--the ambiguous, wistful longing from both parties, the inevitability of their failure to make a connection, Conrad's pain, Beth's unwillingness to make anything but the most superficial acknowledgement of his existance. Her token gestures of motherhood--telling Conrad to work harder at swimming, to wear his jacket in the cold--are revealed as meaningless by her total inability to share a single moment of emotional honesty with her suffering son. It's quietly, almost gently heartbreaking, all this failure.