Best remembered for classics such as All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, and Barefoot in the Park, as well as the popular GIF of Jeremiah Johnson, it was a second career in directing that took the natural (pun intended) New Hollywood movie star and created a real legacy for Robert Redford.
In a tribute on his Instagram, actor Ethan Hawke likened Redford as ‘our ultimate champion of independent film and a relentless advocate for authentic storytelling,’ and perhaps the greatest example is that of 1980 Best Picture recipient Ordinary People, starring Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton. The film itself premiered at the third Sundance Film Festival, which in 2025 is the largest film festival in the United States, and was founded by production studio Wildwood Entertainment, which was founded by Redford while shooting his 1975 classic Three Days of the Condor. It goes without saying that the festival is named after Redford, who famously portrayed The Sundance Kid. One of the first big independent films to premiere at a festival that launched filmmakers and landed distribution for the directorial debuts of auteurs such Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape), Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight), and Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket), Redford’s own first foray into independent cinema offered as authentic a piece of storytelling ever made.
Ordinary People has a complicated legacy as it’s one of those films that didn’t have as enduring a legacy in the cultural zeitgeist as some of contemporaries, and remains the film that ‘beat’ Raging Bull, the Martin Scorsese classic starring Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta, and making Redford one of two actors who upset a Scorsese masterpiece in Best Director with their debut. However, that doesn’t invalidate what Redford authored on screen, in fact, it turns it into one of the most underrated Best Picture recipients in the history of the Academy Awards because for what Raging Bull provided for its harsh look at untreated mental health in a time where that wasn’t considered normal, Ordinary People provided for grief with a very progressive, extraordinary look at the trauma left behind by the loss of a child.
Ordinary People stood out because it didn’t just tell the story about the parents who lost their son, rather explored through the lens of Timothy Hutton’s character, the brother, who had been so neglected while his parents grieved that he himself attempted suicide, forcing his parents to confront that fallout. But as is with all grief, the characters’ motivations were as complex as the actions that they led to. It wasn’t just the fact that his parents were lost in their world that had been left shattered, it was just as much the platitudes that normalized what had happened to his brother from everybody else. For Hutton’s Conrad, his brother wasn’t everybody else, and his brother wasn’t somebody to be normalized and ordinary.
As the film continues, Conrad deals with his own struggles of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, while Sutherland’s Calvin dives headfirst into his relationship with Conrad, refusing to give him any space, as a way to fill the void. Meanwhile, Mary Tyler Moore’s Beth pretends for a majority of the film that their other son, Buck, didn’t exist, and routinely does every performative thing she can do to outwardly present a perfect life, further alienating Conrad in the process. Ordinary People became a fascinating character study not because of the situation that the characters find themselves in, but because each character grieves in their own way. One tries to fill the void, one tries to pretend the void didn’t exist, and one desperately seeks to remember the person that left the void. These are regular, everyday people, but they find themselves reacting differently to a life-changing, very human event, and having very human responses to the loss of somebody that had been an extraordinary person to them.
Hutton is the star of the film, the young actor who gives a very colorful and physical performance. With the sudden loss of a loved one, for a lot of people time stands still as you’re left wallowing in the last memory you had of them, everything you wish you would have said, and finding solace in the moments you shared with them, telling everybody around about the greatest stories. This is all that Conrad wants to do as he begins to cope, and when those around him won’t let him, he starts to fight, because for him, he’s fighting for the memory of his brother. The crux of struggle within the film is because his parents grieve in the opposite way: exploring the memories they remember remind them that they can no longer make new memories, and that’s something that Conrad wasn’t quite mature enough to understand.
While Conrad goes through therapy and finds himself, it’s truly the veteran actors that ground the film. Mary Tyler Moore plays Beth in exemplary fashion, taking a character that seems vain and cold and humanizing her in a way that the audience at home can both understand and empathize with, a victim of an era where matriarchs had to be proper, ultimately impacting how she responded to both of her children, deceased and alive. This is balanced out by the struggle of the Calvin character, and forcing his hand at the end of the film to confront Beth, and ultimately have her move out. As Calvin and Conrad learn their boundaries, Calvin learned how to make the hard decisions that were in the best interest of his son, causing another life-altering shift in the process, which the audience can also empathize with.
Known better for her work on television with The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, this became Moore’s only Oscar nomination in her career, coming close to the win, but ultimately losing to Sissy Spacek’s performance in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Redford had bought the rights to the adaptation many years prior, particularly with Mary Tyler Moore in mind, despite the fact that his long-time friend Natalie Wood campaigned hard for the role. Wood, who launched Redford’s career by casting him as co-lead of both Inside Daisy Clover and This Property is Condemned in the 1960s, had a falling with Redford over this and the two did not re-connect before her drowning in 1981. But this role had been made for Mary Tyler Moore, and it’s hard to see anybody else pull it off, even somebody as strong an actor as Wood. Meanwhile, Timothy Hutton became the youngest actor in history, at age 20, to win the Best Supporting Actor award, still the youngest recipient to this day. Hutton has since had a steady career of work, but has yet to reach even remotely close to the same heights as his first theatrical picture.
This wasn’t your typical ‘commercial’ fare that audiences had become accustomed to with Redford’s acting career, but it is an important piece of American media. One that 30 years before mental health awareness truly took over, delicately portrayed topics ranging from grief to suicide to therapy to PTSD. Its filmmaking may not be as audacious as some of its competitors and obviously Redford isn’t as revered a filmmaker as Scorsese, Lynch, or Polanski, all of whom he defeated to win the Best Director Oscar in 1981, but it is a movie that treats Ordinary People as such: people, and it’s a film that continues to age gracefully while tackling subjects that at one point where considered taboo.
Redford’s directing career wasn’t quite as prolific as his acting career, but 1992’s A River Runs Through It and 1994’s Quiz Show were worthy follow-ups, keeping from being a director that peaked in his debut. Redford passed away this morning at the age of 89, a true Hollywood heavyweight who had garnered nominations for four Oscars in three different jobs, and is one of the few actors that was the lead star in multiple Best Picture winners. But his impact in the industry goes beyond what he did on the screen as the film festival that launched his career as an independent director is directly responsible for creating the infrastructure of the modern landscape of independent cinema.
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