I have long had a bias against Ordinary People. The feeling comes from a common impression that Raging Bull is actually 1980's movie of the year. Since I grew up under the cloud of auteur directors I've long believed Robert Redford's directorial debut is nothing more than a blown-up TV movie.

Not to entirely ignore this possibility I recently re-screened Ordinary People and discovered something more than filler entertainment. While still not convinced of its worthiness as a seminal movie like Psycho, Citizen Kane or Young Sherlock Holmes, I now think Ordinary People is a good film.

As the movie based on Judith Guest's celebrated novel, Alvin Sargent adapted the book for Robert Redford who wisely used it to punctuate this move away from acting into a career as movie director and statesman of American cinema. Guest's novel proved exactly the right source material for his crossover as a declining sex symbol into being a film artist as organized around her book that packed an emotional wallop.

So too Redford began organizing an effort to showcase independent cinematic voices that eventually became the Sundance Film Festival. Its focus on fiction and nonfiction movies produced outside Hollywood proved a viable means of distributing new movies and also let him be a culturally responsible movie mogul. Long before all of this was fully achieved, however, Ordinary People was Redford's cause in detailing suburban materialism as a cover for absent human connections.

These background considerations are important because Redford's career has been marked with increasing achievements the longer he's remained a cinematic force. That is, Redford's acting was typically written off as being a pretty boy's panache without matching skill. But his abilities as director gave Academy voters an opportunity to consider him as an artist more than had previously seemed possible. Of course his devotion to a now institutionalized film festival also made him a politically correct award winner for virtually anything that could be thrown his way.

Thus, Ordinary People was named Best Picture of 1980 even if its detractors, myself included, maintain that it is emotionally affecting but otherwise somewhat conventional. Lacking qualities to make it a screen classic it is a viable drama with all the requisite tragic elements to become an award winner and safe bet for quality movies since it is, after all, a fine film with high production value.

Nominated for the top Academy Award with Coal Miner's Daughter, The Elephant Man, Raging Bull and Tess, Ordinary People was the most appetizing, and possibly rewarding, title of the five nominees. With it's story about a closed family circle it was considered groundbreaking, not from its subject but more from its realization about how rich families can't guarantee happiness and security the way they might be assumed to.

Such an ethos reflected its time since 1980 was a year of transition. It was the time of Hollywood's financial resurgence with various conglomerates entering the entertainment industry to underwrite movie and TV studios as a method for diversifying multi-national investments.

Likewise there was a flowering of the so-called film school generation who matured through the '70s and produced some of the most important filmmakers and films of all time. With names like Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, De Palma and Stone, the early '80s were a heady time of ambitious productions, unrivaled movie technologies innovations and a rising cult of youth-oriented entertainments.

There was also the consolidation of cable movie channels, videotape operations and the maturation of entirely new ancillary markets including action figures, clothing lines, video games and Saturday morning cartoons. Franchise entertainment was the name of the moment with production by committee, easily reproduced formulae and bankable stars being the foundation of Hollywood movies over the heralded '70s values of risk, innovation and conflict.

Into this mix of changing fiscal concerns, expanding exhibition opportunities and diluted artistic risk, Ordinary People was released to wide acclaim. Largely ignoring the complications of a big budget, major movie stars and special effects, it tells the story of the Jarretts, an upper class suburban family living outside Chicago. Taking direction from the family's younger, and only surviving, son Conrad (Timothy Hutton), the movie works through layers of survivor's guilt to expose the bogeymen of rich WASP families.

Because Conrad was recently released from a psychiatric hospital after trying to kill himself, he's troubled with fitting back into circumstances that now seem alien. His tax-attorney father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland), is well intentioned but perhaps too timid at dealing with his son's struggles while his mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), is cold and unable to deal with him at all. Unfortunately for all three, Conrad is the only one seeking a solution to his troubles although Calvin and Beth are similarly haunted by tragedy.

Conrad begins seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch). Together they uncover Conrad's fundamental guilt for having survived a Great Lakes tragedy that killed his older brother, Buck (Scott Doebler), who is seen in flashback as Conrad manages to heal through talk therapy and personal forgiveness. Along the way he also manages to open up to a friend from school named Jeannine (Elizabeth McGovern) who helps him risk feeling love and affection.

Beyond its storyline, though, Ordinary People is usually remembered as Redford's Oscar-winning debut and as Moore's casting against type as ice queen, Beth Jarrett. Her performance is a mix of helplessness, anger and silent denial as she pulls back from Conrad's emerging personality and conflict with her own binds of guilt and self-destruction. Unable to accept her surviving son in light of losing her favorite, Buck, she's unable to keep herself happy and relies on the class routines to buttress family affairs and ignore their disintegration.

Playing off Sutherland's wholly sympathetic father, Moore becomes the epitome of the castrating mother. Her indifference to her husband's suffering is set off by how closely she observes social rituals with cocktail parties, shopping trips and the surface order of a well-run home. Her similar disinterest in Conrad divides the family between healing and hurting and makes her out as the force of destruction to be ejected in the movie's end as she and Calvin part ways even as Conrad proclaims love for his father.

Throughout this domestic tension Marvin Hamlisch's scant score adapts Pachelbel's famous canon giving the film a simultaneous musical and dramatic theme. First heard over the credits sequence when Conrad is introduced singing in the school choir it's later used to heighten certain moments of his consequent maturation. The two themes coalesce with Berger's talking cure and finally end the film as father and son embrace with absented mother and the disintegration of the nuclear family made complete.

Not a particularly forward thinking movie along the lines of gendered dynamics, Ordinary People's weird resonance is often felt in the '70s and '80s generation of suburban children who grew up in circumstances similar to Conrad Jarrett. With wealth at their fingertips and a quality of expectation always at the ready, Redford's debut may be about family tragedy and its aftermath but it's also a stinging portrait of American contentment at collecting material goods at the expense of self.

Without over-emphasizing its detailing of this socio-economic stratum, Ordinary People is about some ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Having grossed $54.8 million domestically, it was a modest financial success with a devoted audience who enjoyed its focus on conversation, emotion and complex human relationships. Released on the heels of such blockbuster entertainment as The Empire Strikes Back and Superman II that grossed $290 million and $108 million respectively, Redford's movie shows the relative commercial appeal of a more adult picture and was elevated in the race for critical laurels by comparison with more childish entertainment.

Two final notes of interest:
· Giving urgency to his Oscar-winning performance, Hutton's father, Jim, died just before he set to work on Ordinary People. Though he's denied using his father's death as the emotional mooring for Conrad Jarrett, it's reasonable to speculate about how Jim Hutton's passing enlivened the believability of his son's performance.
· Mary Tyler Moore was similarly dealt a tragic blow with the death of her son, and only child, Ritchie, who was killed in a gun-related accident prior to beginning the film. Were it not for her loss I wonder if the cardboard part she inhabited would have been given the three-dimensional breadth she eventually offered on-screen.

Regardless, Ordinary People is a potent family drama and remains a symptom of '80s concerns with therapy, overbearing mothers, troubled fathers and children cut adrift with material advantages but scant few emotional resources to help in troubled times.