Adapted from the novel Ordinary People by Judith Guest
The Jarretts were once a relatively ordinary, if privileged, family, but not anymore. First, the older son drowned in a boating accident. Then, racked with guilt, surviving son Conrad attempted to take his own life. Now, Conrad has returned from the mental hospital and is back in school, trying to pretend everything is okay and that he isn't depressed anymore so his father doesn't have to worry about him. But Calvin Jarrett does worry about his son, and tries everything he can think of to relieve his pain. His wife Beth, on the other hand, tries to pretend that nothing has happened, but treats her son with cold civility. With the help of a psychiatrist, Conrad begins to emerge from his haze of suppressed feelings and remember what it feels like to be a person again.
I think this adaptation is probably one of the best to win this award. The characters are completely consistent with the novel's descriptions. Several details of the story were altered, but none of the changes ruined the tone or the big picture. The novel switches back and forth between Calvin and Conrad's perspectives more than the film, which is mostly focused on Conrad, but the film's audience is never in any doubt about how Calvin feels or what his role in the family is. Pretty much the only real changes that made significant differences have to do with Conrad's relationship with Jeannine, which progresses a lot further in the book than in the movie, but the story is really about Conrad's family rather than his love life, so I feel like the decision to sacrifice some of the romance to focus more on the family drama was a wise one.
One wouldn't think that the book would lend itself to a movie very well, since so much of it consists of descriptions of characters' thoughts, but this movie does a brilliant job of showing and telling these thoughts to the audience. Conrad has more conversations with his psychiatrist in the movie than the book, but most of the added ones are about things that Conrad thought and did in the book when he was alone. In this way, the extra therapy sessions weren't really additions so much as a different way of conveying the same information that was better suited to the medium of film. Most adaptations do this to a certain extent, but rarely is it done this well.
This doesn't really have anything to do with the adapted screenplay, but I have to add that the acting in this movie is incredible. As good as the script is, so much of it is about people fighting for control over their emotions that the acting is crucial to whether it works or not. And everybody nailed it. Seriously. I would have given all four of the main actors Oscars. As it was, only Timothy Hutton won, which, if only one of them could have, was the right decision, although how anybody could call his role "supporting" I don't understand. I guess it was just because he was so young. Anyway, there's not a lot of action in this movie, but it's one of the most genuine, raw stories about pain and depression I've ever seen, and certainly one of the best film adaptations of a book I've read.
Next up: On Golden Pond, for which Katharine Hepburn won her fourth and final Best Actress Oscar, based on the play by Ernest Thompson
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