The Moving Story of a Suburban Chicago Family

The Moving Story of a Suburban Chicago Family

The 1980 movie, Ordinary People, which starred Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton, is the moving story of a suburban Chicago family that is in the throes of crisis, but one in which the three family members involved deal with (or not deal with) the crisis in very different ways. In this story, the Jarrett’s are left a family of three after the boating accident death of their oldest son. Conrad (Hutton) is the 17 year old surviving son, whose guilt over his part in the accident and the anger and sadness at the death of his brother, leads him to attempt suicide which is an act which has huge implications on the survival of the entire family. The issues explored are many, but the overriding theme that permeates this film is how destructive denial of the truth can be in the family unit and how, with hard work, honesty and forgiveness, it is possible that denial can be overcome.
As we see every day in our own families, denial is sometimes seen as the easy way out where the truth may not be. Our children when confronted with the reality of a situation (who broke the toy?) find it easier and natural to make it go away with denial (I didn’t touch the toy) rather than to open themselves up to criticism, punishment or embarrassment. In Ordinary People, Beth (the mother played by Moore) shows us to what extreme the deep denial of the realities of a situation can go to, and how selfish the act of denial can make us. In her situation, her son tried to kill himself and is seeing a psychiatrist. If this were our family, this situation may be looked at as a great positive; he is not dead and he now is getting help. In Beth’s case she is horrified by what others would think of HER if they knew her child was imperfect, and she finds it easier to deny that this situation exists (and that he has serious problems) than to face the opinions of her friends and neighbors. Pretend everything is OK and no one will be the wiser.
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