Reviewing Movies

Watched it last night in my VHS copy for the first time in decades. It won the 20-year-old Timothy Hutton an Academy Award. Dircted by Robert Redford it is an actor's movie. 

First shock is seeing how young and svelte is Donald Sutherland who plays the father. As the frigid, self-centred mother Mary Tyler Moore appears as if ready to shatter at any moment. A woman so locked inside her own skin that she is incapable of placing her arms around her son when he gives her a hug good night. In the end it is the father here who shows his feminine side. 

The movie survives on the strength of its actors' performances. There is no background soundtrack to set the mood or tone. The upper class neighbourhood where Conrad lives is sterile and featureless. 

Wracked by survivor's guilt Conrad, as his father stipulates much like his mother, is unable to express or come to terms with his own feelings which he has locked deep inside. Depression is anger directed inward and Conrad displays all the classic symptoms. Lack of sleep, loss of interest in former activities, loss of appetite. Highly intelligent he continues to read, a paperback never far from hand--what was he reading? He reaches out to friends who obviously care about him and displays interest in the opposite sex. Of course he misses the older brother whom he lost whose room is still maintained next his own two years after the death. Conrad, of course, is not the only one in this family that has lost a loved one. His parents lost a child and portray all the classic stesses though the mother refuses to accept any form of counselling attaching stigma and weakness to asking for help. Marriage breakdown following the death of a child is all too common.  

In the end though this is Hutton's movie, his sessions with Judd Hirsh supplying only glympses of his inner turmoil. Psychaitrists give patients their home phone numbers?