Ordinary People

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ordinary People arrived in theaters on the 19th of September 1980, and it carried a deceptively plain title for a film that would collect four Academy Awards and gross $90 million on a budget of just $6.2 million. It was Robert Redford's first feature as a director, and it asked audiences to sit inside a grief they were never supposed to talk about. The Jarrett family of Lake Forest, Illinois, look like everything is fine. They live in a wealthy suburb north of Chicago. Their remaining son has just come home from four months in a psychiatric hospital. Their older boy is dead. And yet the question hanging over every scene is not whether this family can survive, but whether one member of it even wants them to.

  What made Redford reach for this particular story, drawn from a 1976 novel by Judith Guest? How did a cast that nearly included Gene Hackman and Natalie Wood end up reshaping careers in ways no one predicted? And what does it mean that a film about a fracturing family in suburban Illinois went on to become one of the most debated Best Picture winners in Hollywood history?

• 2. A Family Coming Apart

  ›

  Conrad Jarrett, played by Timothy Hutton, returns home from a psychiatric hospital carrying guilt he cannot yet name. He was present on the sailboat when his older brother Buck died in an accident, and the weight of that fact has already driven him to one suicide attempt. At home, his father Calvin, played by Donald Sutherland, works constantly to bridge gaps that keep widening. His mother Beth, played by Mary Tyler Moore, is determined to project normalcy and perfection, refusing to let the household look like what it has become.

  Dr. Tyrone Berger, played by Judd Hirsch, enters Conrad's life as a psychiatrist who refuses to let his patient stay comfortable. The sessions between Hutton and Hirsch trace Conrad's slow, painful recognition that he has been punishing himself for surviving. Conrad also begins dating Jeannine, played by Elizabeth McGovern, a fellow student who helps him regain a foothold in ordinary life. But the film is structured so that each step forward Conrad takes is met by a new fracture in the household.

  The Christmas sequence makes the film's central conflict impossible to ignore. Conrad swears at Beth in front of his grandparents after she refuses to take a photograph with him. When Beth later discovers he has been lying about his whereabouts after school, she confronts him directly, and Conrad tells her she never once visited him in the hospital. Her reply is devastating: Buck would never have been in the hospital in the first place. It is the closest the film comes to letting Beth state her grief openly, and it reads, entirely, as an accusation.

• 3. The Cast That Almost Was

  ›

  Gene Hackman was originally cast as Calvin Jarrett, the father. He left the project when he and the studio could not reach a financial agreement. Donald Sutherland took the role, and his performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Entertainment Weekly later described the Academy's failure to nominate Sutherland as one of the biggest acting snubs in the history of the awards, a fact that registers differently once you understand he was competing for attention in a film that gave him no obvious showoff moments.

  Natalie Wood was considered for the role of Beth before Mary Tyler Moore was cast. The choice of Moore carried a specific cultural weight. Audiences in 1980 knew her primarily as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show and as Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Both characters were warm, relatable, and beloved. Beth Jarrett is cold, defended, and difficult to forgive. A journalist named Julia L. Hall, writing in 2017 after Moore's death, described the performance as portraying her character's narcissism with precision, and praised Moore for taking such a career risk so soon after her most famous work.

  Then there is the audition story that passed into Hollywood legend. A then-unknown Michael J. Fox had just moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. He tried out for the role of Conrad Jarrett. Redford, reportedly, flossed his teeth during the audition, a detail that suggests how unimpressed the director was. Timothy Hutton won the part, won the Oscar for it at age 20, and became the youngest actor to win Best Supporting Actor at that point.

• 4. Breaking New Ground

  ›

  Judd Hirsch's Dr. Berger was a deliberate departure from his well-known work on the sitcom Taxi. Hirsch earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Academy Awards, losing to his co-star Hutton. But the reception among psychiatric professionals was unusually warm. Ordinary People drew praise from many in that community as one of the rare instances where psychiatry is depicted in a positive and credible light on screen.

  Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Jeannine, was attending Juilliard at the time of filming and received special permission from the school to take the role. The film launched her career. Alvin Sargent's screenplay, adapted from Judith Guest's novel, was ranked 58th on the Writers Guild of America's list of 101 Greatest Screenplays in 2006. The script won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 53rd ceremony, where the film also took Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor.

  At the 38th Golden Globe Awards, Ordinary People won five prizes, including Best Motion Picture Drama and Best Actress for Moore. Roger Ebert awarded the film four stars and praised its refusal to treat the suburban setting as a problem to be diagnosed. He wrote that the film's setting is handled with understated matter-of-factness, and that the problems of the people in the film grow out of themselves rather than their milieu. He placed it fifth on his list of the best films of 1980. His colleague Gene Siskel ranked it second.

• 5. Pachelbel and Lasting Reach

  ›

  Pachelbel's Canon had existed for centuries before Ordinary People used it. For most of that time, it remained relatively obscure outside academic circles. The film's prominent use of the piece helped bring it into mainstream popular culture, a consequence that its own composer could not have anticipated and that Redford likely did not set out to engineer.

  On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 90% approval rating based on 105 reviews, with an average score of 8.50 out of 10. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave it an A+ grade. Writing for The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby described it as a moving, intelligent, and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them. The film was released on DVD in 2001 and received a 4K restoration when it arrived on Blu-ray in March 2022.

  In 2025, Pope Leo XIV named Ordinary People as one of his favorite films, a detail that points to the film's durable reach across audiences and decades. What began as a modestly budgeted drama about a family in Lake Forest has remained, for more than forty years, a film that people find when they need it.