Word: sargent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what's a woman to do? Alvin Sargent's screenplay doesn't give her much of a chance. The mother represents a world that is inhumanly (and not very artfully) satirized throughout Ordinary People. She is a caricature--she hates her son for spilling his blood on her clean towels--so it's hard to take her or the conflicts she causes seriously. A great actress, and nothing less than a great actress, might have transcended her lines, brought something to the movie that was never there to begin with. Then again, greatness is quite a lot for a screenwriter...
...mother's characterization is the biggest problem with Sargent's screenplay, but not the only one. He and Redford try to work with symbols--the silver napkin rings, a doorbell, a lack of pets in the house, a broken plate--details that fail to accumulate, leaving a mess. It's all too obvious; just so the dialogue...
...mother and the son can't communicate--get it? There is no surer sign of an amateur than this sort of narrative intrusion; Ordinary People goes, not from situations to ideas, but from ideas to illustrations. Sargent and Redford might as well come in front of the proscenium and tell us what they're thinking. We'd all get home a lot sooner...
ORDINARY PEOPLE Directed by Robert Redford; Screenplay by Alvin Sargent...
...four decades was dominated by John Maynard Keynes' disciples, who stressed a strong stimulative role for the government in the economy, is now swinging away from state solutions. The new Rational Expectations school, led by the University of Chicago's Robert Lucas and the University of Minnesota's Thomas Sargent, emphasizes that government policy initiatives often do more harm than good, creating more inflation than economic growth. The hottest topic among Washington economists is the "supply side" theory. It maintains that Keynesian policies placed too much emphasis on stimulating consumer and business demand and paid too little attention to stimulating...