Word: conrad
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...first directorial effort takes place in one of the wealthiest spots in the country, Lake Forest, Illinois, and the "ordinary" people are the Jarret family: Calvin, the father (Sutherland), a successful tax attorney and ineffectual nice guy; Beth, the mother (Moore), a gracious but icily repressed suburbanite; and Conrad, their son (Hutton), who spent four months in a mental hospital after slashing his wrists. Conrad's troubles unfold slowly: his older brother Buck (mother's favorite) died in a boating accident which Conrad survived. Beth "buried the best of her love" with Buck, and Conrad has been punishing himself ever...
...that the best rule for choosing a quotation was simply his own taste. "We have tried to make literary power the criterion rather than width and vulgarity of fame," he wrote. Morley's view of literary power brought the Bartlett's debuts of Dostoevsky, Blake, Conrad and T.S. Eliot, along with four columns of quotes from Morley's own forgettable works. World War II, in turn, made literary power yield to political power. Enter Churchill, Hitler, Douglas MacArthur and the Charter of the United Nations...
SOMETHING IS WRONG in Lake Forest, Ill. A kid dies in a boating accident. His brother, Conrad, who was there when it happened, tries to kill himself. Later, he has nightmares, so he goes to see a psychiatrist. His father doesn't have nightmares, but he goes to see the psychiatrist too. Conrad's old girlfriend kills herself. Conrad gets better; his mother leaves his father. Pretty soon, we get the point--everyone here is getting divorced and seeing a psychiatrist and killing himself...
...himself, it's certainly better for art when he does. Watching most psychotherapy in action is not all that different from watching a colostomy, or any other doctor-work; among other things, it makes for lousy dialogue, and Ordinary People is full of it, endless psychobabbled colloquys between Conrad and his psychiatrist (Jewish, of course) who smokes cigarettes, drinks bottomless cups of coffee, wears shawl-collared cardigans to the office, and agrees to be Conrad's "friend" for 50 bucks an hour. It seems as if Redford should be satirizing this too, all these people saying "Do you want...
Twice in the movie, Conrad picks up a paperback copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, inviting unwelcome comparisons with a more successful American epic, in which Hunter Thompson makes as much sense as you could of the heart disease in the thorax of the American Dream. There is little of Fear and Loathing in Ordinary People, only a bizarre hope of salvation through psychiatry and a blissfully naive belief in the power of love. Clearly, something is really wrong, not only in Lake Forest, Ill., but in America. Yet nobody seems to know exactly what it is that...