Ordinary people revealed Mary Tyler Moore’s other side

Opinion

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This article was published 04/02/2017 (3137 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I was saddened to hear of the death of Mary Tyler Moore. Like many women my age, I was imprinted by The Mary Tyler Moore Show. For most of us, I suspect there was always that impulse to celebrate life-changing moments — the first grown-up job, the first apartment — by throwing our berets in the air, Mary Richards-style.

My first thought was of Moore’s extraordinarily wide and sunny smile. It could turn the world on, after all. It really could. An inspired comedian, Moore was godmother to TV series like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation and basically anything that features modern, funny, feminist women.

My second thought was of that same smile chilled and fixed in Ordinary People, the 1980 film that is Moore’s best known foray into sadness. She gives a fascinating performance, deepened and darkened by playing against her usual perkiness.

The first film directed by Robert Redford, Ordinary People is an exploration of muted upper-middle-class suffering that many cineastes dismiss with “I can’t believe it beat Raging Bull for Best Picture” scorn.

The film has long been punished for that Oscar win, but seen on its own terms — and yes, that includes killingly tasteful backgrounds and Pachelbel’s Canon on the soundtrack — Ordinary People actually works, mostly through its three central performances. Moore and Donald Sutherland — also cast against his usual type — play Beth and Calvin Jarrett, while the very young Timothy Hutton is their son Conrad.

Ordinary People is set in a moneyed Chicago suburb, where fathers work in the city, mothers lunch and play golf, and high school kids dutifully do their extra-curriculars so they can get into good universities. Beth Jarrett seems like the perfect wife and mother — French toast for breakfast, homemade caramel apples for Halloween, polished parquet floors — except for the fact she can barely even look at her second son, Conrad. She has trouble standing close to him for a family photo or returning his desperate hug.

Under the immaculate surfaces presented by their white Colonial house and nicely tended yard, the Jarretts are grieving the death of their older son, Bucky, in a sailing accident that Conrad survived. Athletic, outgoing and confident, Bucky was Beth’s golden boy. Conrad is an introverted kid burdened by survivor’s guilt and suicidal thoughts. His struggle with mental illness becomes an emotional mess the hyper-controlled Beth simply can’t abide.

Dressed in a palette of beige — bone, biscuit, taupe, oatmeal, caramel, off-white — Beth keeps up a kind of Pinteresque version of suburban small talk, about auto mechanics and house repairs, deftly fending off anything approaching emotional expression.

She sometimes flashes that Mary Tyler Moore vivacity at cocktail parties and country club events, but it feels stiff and practiced, a kind of empty sparkle. With her family, especially with Conrad, she is frozen and flinty.

A lot of reviews at the time described Beth as the absolute antithesis of Moore’s “America’s sweetheart” persona and lauded Moore’s bravery in going full bitch. But what really makes this performance is the way Moore sees past those either/or polarities. She empathizes with Beth as a woman who has always done what she was expected to do and is simply lost when that is no longer enough.

It could be that Moore was channelling some of her own pain at the time, as she faced the breakdown of her second marriage, an ongoing battle with alcoholism, and a strained relationship with her only son, who died in 1980 at age 24.

It could also be that Moore’s ground-breaking professional achievements — not just onscreen but behind the scenes with her successful production company, at a time when this was unusual for women — required some of Beth’s steely competence and control.

Yes, Mary Tyler Moore will always be our Mary Richards, plucky and independent and fun, but there was probably some Beth Jarrett in there, too. Remembering Moore, it feels important to honour both of these sides.

Moore’s comedic work makes her dramatic turn as Beth Jarrett so much starker and effective. But her poignant performance in Ordinary People also brings some retrospective illumination to her comedy, reminding us that the seemingly effortless radiance wasn’t always so easy and the sunniness was sometimes hard-won.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca