BEFORE: Dysfunctional Family Week continues, with a film that won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars - so I really should have watched this by now.
THE PLOT: The accidental death of the older son of an affluent family deeply strains the relationships among the bitter mother, the good-natured father, and the guilt-ridden younger son.
AFTER: Meh...this one didn't affect me the way I thought it would. I did feel sorry for the son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton), who blamed himself for his brother's death. God, he looks like 8 miles of bad road at the start of the film, when he can't sleep, can't eat, and he's just come out of the hospital.
But it's hard for me to feel sorry for his parents (Donald Sutherland + Mary Tyler Moore) because it seems like their biggest problem is what golf resort to go to on their next vacation. Oh yeah, I know it's probably a brave front, but by burying their emotions about the family tragedy, it makes them seem callous somehow, like mourning their son is somehow beneath them. Was that the point?
Judd Hirsch does a great job as Dr. Berger, the psychiatrist, but I don't know about casting America's Sweetheart of the 70's, Mary Tyler Moore, as a cold, emotionless guilt-inducing mother... Boy, what a week it's been for mothers - first we had Anjelica Huston as a con-artist mom, then Kate Nelligan playing favorites with her kids, then Maureen Stapleton ignoring her husband's abuse of her daughter. It turned out to be a real back-handed slap at dysfunctional mothers, right after Mother's Day! I swear, I didn't plan it...
Maybe I'm jaded, but I just found most of the film to be very boring. It's mostly people sitting around, talking about their feelings, and I always say, "Show, don't tell."
Also starring Elizabeth McGovern, James Sikking, and M. Emmet Walsh as the swim coach.
RATING: 4 out of 10 gold medals
>>>But it's hard for me to feel sorry for his parents because it seems like their biggest problem is what golf resort to go to on their next vacation.<<<
ReplyDeleteSee, I don't feel that way at all. MTM is the perfect mother, wife and housekeeper, as long as things are going her way. Once a monkey-wrench is thrown in her routine she can't cope. So yes, I'd have to say that she never really dealt with her grief -- psychiatry had a real stigma attached to it in the 70's. She tried to normalize her life as soon as possible after her son's death, only to have her other son ruin her routine AGAIN by trying to kill himself. This isn't how her life was supposed to be. She has no idea how to adapt to change, and poor DS is only finding this out now. I guess up to now, they've been a picture-perfect family.
I thought the film was a masterpiece and if MTM wasn't nominated for Best Actress, well, she should have been, just for her ability to make you uncomfortable with a look or her body movement. Take the scene where they're taking family pictures and DS can't figure out how to use the camera -- she's clearly miserable standing next to Tim Hutton, she can't wait to get out of there, and as a viewer, I was hurting for him.
I know it's depressing, but 4 out of 10? And 8 out of 10 for the Simpsons? Sorry, there are some things on which we do not agree... :)
Part of the method of figuring out a movie's place on a 1 to 10 scale is just asking myself the simple question, "How entertained do I feel right now?" It's not an exact system, just a quick snapshot of my mood at the moment of the film's completion.
ReplyDeleteA comedy might have the inside track, because by its very nature, it (ideally) generates positive feelings like laughter - I chuckled quite a few times during the Simpsons film. However, a comedy that fails to make me laugh is due for a lower number...
How "entertained" was I by watching a film about a depressed teen and a family falling apart? It's heavier fare, sure, and therefore it's got a more difficult road ahead of it, a tougher challenge to entertain me with that sort of storyline.
That's not to say it's impossible - "The Darjeeling Limited" covered some of the same themes, with 3 brothers in a family falling apart after their father's death. And I gave that film a "9", since it succeeding in entertaining me to that degree, on that particular day.
Look, it's all subjective. You could even say that the 8 I gave to "The Simpsons Movie" was due to the contrast from watching "Ordinary People" the day before. I needed to laugh, and the film made me laugh.
While I do agree that a comedy has to make one laugh in order to be considered entertaining, I don't feel that serious dramas should be judged on a, "How entertained was I?" type scale. Rather, it should be judged on a "How much did this story move me?" scale. And I do believe that Ordinary People was an extraordinarily moving film. Now, if you don't feel moved or touched by a story, or if you don't relate to it in any way, then I can say you can give it a 4 on the scale.
ReplyDeleteWas I entertained by Ordinary People? No, I wasn't. Was I deeply moved by the story? Absolutely -- a tear-jerker supreme.