Ordinary People

Released:  September 19^th, 1980

Rated:  R

Studio:  Paramount Pictures

Starring:  Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, Timothy Hutton

Directed by:  Robert Redford

Written by:  Alvin Sargent

Personal Bias Alert:  haven’t read the book, few preconceived notions about those involved

6.5 of 10

            Let’s go back in time a bit.  It’s 1980, and you’re sitting in a movie theater watching the trailer for an intense family drama.  You think, Donald Sutherland makes sense, but what’s Mary Tyler Moore doing being so shrill?  And who is Timothy Hutton?  And does that say Robert Redford is the director!?  A few months later you’ll watch everyone but Sutherland attending the Oscars, with Hutton and Redford taking home trophies and the film being named Best Picture.

              I think it’s important to recognize just how much uncertainty must have hung over Ordinary People prior to its release.  It covers very difficult material with a first time director and a twenty year old actor making his feature film debut.  Moore and Judd Hirsch would have seemed miscast in their serious roles, leaving Sutherland as the only sure thing.  It doesn’t surprise me, then, to know that people reacted so strongly to such a solid movie.  There’s a lot to admire here, but I’m afraid I found it a bit overrated.

            Like I said, this is one intense family drama, detailing the crumbling of a well-to-do family after a devastating loss.  Sutherland and Moore star as the parents, but it’s Hutton as their teenage son, Conrad, who carries the film.  His depression is the most obvious and perhaps the most stereotypical; Conrad begins the film unable to eat or sleep, stumbling through the events of his days.  The part eventually balloons into something much more complex, and Hutton excels at making Conrad’s assorted triumphs and setbacks feel appropriately scaled.  It really is a wonderful performance, and is arguably the strongest aspect of the film.

            The portrait of the parents, in particular Donald Sutherland’s Calvin, is the other big standout.  Neither are the throwaway sort of parents that often appear in movies about teens.  Each have distinct personality traits and flaws, and their relationship with each other is as much a focus in the film as their relationship to Conrad.  What’s even more interesting is that they subvert the traditional gender roles by having the father be the sensitive one and the mother being more aloof and emotionally detached.  Moore does a good job, but she’s noticeably more one-note than Hutton and Sutherland.  Sutherland brings down the house with a couple late scenes that I wouldn’t change for the world.

            This core trio of characters is superbly written by Alvin Sargent, who was adapting from a novel by the same name.  The other characters aren’t as fleshed out, especially a nasty former friend of Conrad’s and the psychologist played by Hirsch.  I actually got annoyed with how stereotypical these two characters were, especially the psychologist, who I half expected at some point to tell Conrad to lie down and talk about his feelings.  I also found Sargent’s sense of pacing to be off, with a prolonged startup that spent several scenes rehashing character beats that we’d already seen.

            Redford’s direction is also a mixed bag.  He’s got solid fundamentals and is clearly comfortable with the style used in many of the late ‘60s and 70’s character-based films.  The problem is that he lacks a sense of personal style.  There’s no interesting framing or camera moves that could add layers to the story.  It’s mostly basic shot setups, and it makes me wonder if Redford was too uneasy to take any chances this early in his directing career.

            Despite the fact that Redford didn’t exactly impress me, I have to hang my lack of enthusiasm at the feet of screenwriter Alvin Sargent.  There were just a few too many missteps with his screenplay for me to totally get behind Ordinary People, even with performances as great as Hutton and Sutherland.

            Other Notes:

Ø  $50 an hour for a psychologist? Sign me up.

Ø  The future Lady Grantham played the girlfriend in her first feature film role.

Ø  That’s one bold ending.

Rachel Getting Married

Released:  October 3^rd, 2008

Rated:  R

Studio:  Sony Pictures Classics

Starring:  Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, Anna Deavere Smith, Tunde Adebimpe

Directed by:  Jonathan Demme

Written by:  Jenny Lumet

Personal Bias Alert:  identifies with Rachel, wouldn’t want to attend this wedding

8 of 10

            This isn’t my family.  I’m not from Connecticut money, my father didn’t hobnob with artists, and no one in my family is a psychologist (my psych minor is the closest we’ve got).  In my family, the weddings tend to be small affairs, and my favorite part is usually guessing how much longer we have before the table of chain smoking, oxygen sucking extended relatives blow up the reception.  And yet, I found myself connecting with this family, recognizing little moments of anguish and joy and relishing in the words they gave me to describe my own family grievances.

            Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) may get the title and the marriage, but the film is about her hurricane of a sister.  The family’s life, it seems, has been engulfed by Kym (Anne Hathaway) for most of her life.  A nasty drug addiction has caused her to bring nothing but drama and disappointment to their clan, and the mistrust that has instilled is apparent as soon as Kym checks out of rehab for her sister’s wedding.  There’s still love there; Rachel embraces her with a joyous smile as soon as Kym appears and her father’s paternal care is embodied by how often he tries to feed her.  Slowly though, as Kym’s behavior proves to be erratic and inappropriate, their guards come up and old wounds are opened.

            Before this film, I never would have described Hathaway as a natural actress.  I liked her in several things, but I could always feel her effort, could always see the actress behind the character.  That’s what makes her performance in Rachel Getting Married so revelatory.  Watching her is like seeing the kid you’ve been rooting for finally hit that home run.  You knew he had it in him, it just took him a while to get there.  Hathaway finally boldly and loudly stepped into her character’s shoes, and it feels just right.

            Rosemarie DeWitt serves as Hathaway’s co-star, counterpoint, and foil.  For all Kym’s loudness, DeWitt’s Rachel is reserved and solid.  Having played a similar role in my own family, I must admit that I connect to Rachel more, and perhaps because of that mildly prefer DeWitt’s performance to Hathaway’s.  Make no mistake, I think both are excellent (along with Bill Irwin as their father), but DeWitt is the one that gets under my skin.  There’s a large, dramatic scene about halfway through the film in which DeWitt lays bare Rachel’s feelings, and she embodies the way I feel towards my family so completely that she actually helped me to better understand my own emotions.

            I give DeWitt a lot of credit for her performance, but of course none of that would have been possible without writer Jenny Lumet.  This is the only screenplay she’s had produced, and its one hell of an effort.  Aside from Rachel, my favorite part is the way she captures the flow of conversations, how they twist and overlap before veering off abruptly into an entirely different direction.  These are the kinds of weighted conversations you have with people you’ve known your whole life, and Lumet captures it in a way not often seen in films.  The screenplay pulls off so many difficult things such as this, that I can’t imagine it’s the only one Lumet has in her.

            Lumet certainly took risks with her screenplay, as did Jonathan Demme with his direction.  I liked many of the choices he made, like shooting handheld to make you feel like you’re jostling through the wedding with everyone else, but some didn’t work out as well.  He indulges a bit too much in the wedding and other extraneous goings-on, and the film loses momentum because of it.  It reminds me of something Christopher Plummer recalled Collin Farrell saying to him while working with the distractible Terrence Malick:  “Aw, we’re just going to be a couple of Ospreys.  He’ll shoot the Ospreys, not us.”  The problem here is that Rachel Getting Married is a character study, so it’s a detriment when the characters become background to the Ospreys.

            Despite this occasional wandering, Rachel Getting Married remains one of my favorite films.  It feels like a very personal film for Lumet and Demme, but it’s open just enough for others to find themselves in.

Other Notes:

Ø  The public’s afraid of me too, Kym.

Ø  The moment with Kym in the kitchen after the dishwasher scene is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve seen.

Ø  Can I hug this film?  I want to hug this film.

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

Released:  May 5^th, 2010

Rated:  Unrated

Studio:  Tribeca Film

Starring:  Jesco White, Mamie White, Sue Bob White, Kirk White

Directed by:  Julien Nitzberg              

Personal Bias Alert:  vaguely familiar with the setting, likes docs to be cleanly edited

5 of 10

            There’s a bridge near my grandparent’s house with concrete walls and a tight turn in the middle.  My dad crashed a car into that concrete, and at the opening our family name is spray painted bright and clear.  My father’s generation put it there, but mine’s clearly been maintaining it.  Everyone on that side of my family live within a 20 mile radius of that bridge.  My grandfather worked in a shirt factory that’s since shut down, and my uncles and most of my cousins work construction.  Many people would look at them and think they were from similar ilk as the Wild and Wonderful Whites, and to a certain extent that’s true.  There’s a shared fatalism that comes from dead-end environments, but then again, my family copes with it much better than the Whites.

            In families like this, there always seems to be one who gets out.  The Whites have Poney, who escaped to Minnesota, and my family has my Dad.  He worked in the shirt factory long enough to buy a motorcycle and put himself through college, where he met my mom and permanently moved from the country to the suburbs.  Hence, I grew up in a totally different environment than that side of my family, but I’m still familiar enough with the lifestyle to be comfortable in it.  I doubt many people who sit down to review this obscure little documentary can come at it from a place of familiarity.

            Most of the White family lives in West Virginia, the heart of Appalachia, and they adhere to many of the coarse stereotypes that come with that region.  If they’re not hustling for money (none of them have jobs) then they’re drinking, drugging, and fighting.  It’s the glorious lifestyle of the outlaw, to live fast, die young, and have a good time doing it.  Stories of the dark side of these choices have been told ad nauseum, and The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia follows the familiar pattern of setting up the boisterous bravado before peeling back to show the sad reality of the life.

            Director Julien Nitzberg previously worked with the family on a PBS documentary about Jesco called The Dancing Outlaw.  You see, the Whites have one positive legacy:  an extreme talent for mountain dancing.  It originated with Jesco’s father, D. Ray, but it hasn’t been enough to pull any of the family out of their stagnant situations.  In fact, the pressure of local fame seems to have made life harder for Jesco, and the entire family suffers from a sense of entitlement. 

At the same time, the White’s lives are filled with the bad breaks that accompany a questionable lifestyle.  Nitzberg and his team followed the Whites for a year, and even they were surprised by how many jarring events they were able to film.  The funny thing is, the Whites readily acknowledge how rough their lives are.  They’re smart people without an ounce of delusion.  They know who they are and the situation that they’re in, and that’s a large part of what’s driven them to take every escape route possible.  This would be easy to overlook, but Nitzberg recognized it and smartly allows this interesting character twist to shine through.

While Nitzberg understands the Whites well, he isn’t as gifted at constructing a film.  He plays his cards too early, revealing from the beginning the sad turns that continuously haunt the family.  It leaves the film with nowhere to go, dragging itself over the same note for its entire runtime.  The film’s only 88 minutes long, but after watching it I could have sworn it was over 2 hours. 

The other problem is that the Whites never seem that fun.  This partially stems from Nitzberg going to the sad stuff too early, but I think it’s due even more to movie’s focus.  It predominantly follows the older Whites, whose voices and bodies are worn from abuse.  It makes the consequences of their lifestyle inescapable; nobody wants to end up like them, no matter how much fun it is to get there.

            To cap it off, there’s some clunky edits and obviously constructed shots.  I have no doubt that the Whites were being exactly who they are, and there’s certainly something fascinating about them, but Nitzberg failed to deliver an interesting story or even a well-made film for them to inhabit.

            Other Notes:

Ø  I really liked the opening credit sequence.  It’s a great song choice.

Ø  Poor grandma.  No one seems to know what she did to deserve those kids.

Ø  “The night I stabbed him was cool.” 

Ø  This film has a very clunky title.

Kramer vs. Kramer

Released:  December 19^th, 1979

Rated:  PG

Studio:  Columbia Pictures

Starring:  Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jane Alexander, Justin Henry

Directed by:  Robert Benton              

Written by:  Robert Benton

Personal Bias Alert:  raised by a stay-at-home dad, finds emotional honesty riveting

8.5 of 10

            I’ve discussed before how difficult it is for ‘issue’ films to age well.  They often seem stuck in their time, commenting on aspects of society that no longer exist.  Watching it, you can appreciate the message its sending, but the shock and outrage is missing.  If the film isn’t about more than its central issue then it becomes doomed to fade away after society comes to its senses.  But if, like Kramer vs. Kramer, it takes a larger, honest look at the story at hand, then it can retain its emotional resonance throughout time.

            Starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, Kramer vs. Kramer is about the ever-changing way we define family.  Specifically, this story takes on the traditional gender roles of parents after Streep’s Joanna divorces Hoffman’s Ted and leaves him with their young son.  Ted had been a workaholic, comfortable with leaving Joanna to take care of the household and the emotional needs of their child.  After her abrupt exit, Ted has to learn how to be more than just a breadwinner, or as Ted tells his son “I’ve got to bring home the bacon and cook it, too.”

            Now I grew up with a stay-at-home dad, so I’m used to seeing a man cook, clean, and shuttle the kids to their various activities.  This was still unusual at the time.  My dad has told me that there were no changing stations in men’s rooms when my brother and I were younger, so he had to ‘improvise.’  I never asked what exactly that meant, because I recognize that it’s probably one of those things best left unknown.  Anyway, what this means is that I’ve always known that fathers can be emotionally supportive and interested in their kids, and conversely that mothers can be intelligent and career-driven.  This is the essential message of Kramer vs. Kramer, and even if it’s outdated, it’s still a decent reminder as we battle more general gender stereotypes.

            Streep’s good in this, earning her first Oscar for the role, but she’s gone for long periods of time, leaving the audience predominately with Hoffman and Justin Henry, who played the couple’s son.  These two are extraordinary, nailing the many scenes between them and giving this film an honest core.  Hoffman, obviously, had been working for quite some time, but Henry was a first-timer, and a dreaded child actor at that.  To leave so much of the movie up to them, to leave each of their skills so bare to the camera, was a gutsy move by writer/director Robert Benton.  Luckily for him and all of us, both men stepped up to the plate.

            Because of these excellent performances and the excellent writing by Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer tackles not only the then-relevant issue of divorce, but also examines the way families and individuals respond to change.  Ted must learn how to balance work and life, and each must adjust their daily routines to their new post-Joanna world.  As with everything, this comes with some good and some bad, but what shines through is the father and son’s growing attachment to each other.  Being that they’re both men, they bond in some untraditional ways, and I love that the film uses little moments like how they share the bathroom in the morning to establish their bond.  It’s these more universal and timeless touches that allow the film to survive the years and will keep it relevant for generations to come.

            The other big thing that Kramer vs. Kramer has going for it is its brutal honesty.  Characters get hot under the collar and yell things they don’t mean, or things they do mean but are difficult to say.  A lot of time passes in this film, so you get to see the different emotional stages of the three family members and how they act in each one.  Sometimes they rise gloriously to the occasion, while other times they trip up and fall flat on their face.  Such is life, and these moments feel honest for each character.

            This truly is a wonderful movie, but it will lose steam for modern audiences when the divorce issue becomes more prevalent in its later portions.  Some of the statements that were grand and envelope-pushing at the time immediately dates it, placing it firmly in a world that some younger folks (including myself) weren’t alive for.  But there’s plenty of timeless stuff to overshadow these moments, and I walked away thinking about my own family, imperfect but loving, just like the Kramers.

            Other Notes:

Ø  That is a great scene between Ted and his neighbor in the park.

Ø  Joanna strikes some dramatic poses when she stalks people.

Ø  Is that a Tab sponsorship I see?

Ø  Ted’s pants were terrible.