Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [171]
The bleakness of the story was the main challenge for Redford. The title, he decided, wasn’t ironic. There was truth in the irreconcilable conflict of trauma survival and disabling guilt. No answers were posited. Berger, the psychiatrist, probes Conrad’s depression, but the critical resolution, which, in the visual reenactment, confronts Conrad with the flashback of his brother’s drowning, fixes nothing in any practical sense; instead, Conrad is obliged to accept a continuum: that what has occurred is irreversible and will rebound onward, affecting not just his life, but the lives of his parents, especially Beth, who abandons her family at the end of the story. “What I wanted was to deal with people who have concerns they cannot handle because they cannot define them,” says Redford. “I was trying to say this is what happened, this is how it is, accept it. To achieve that, we tuned in to the finest twitches of the performances. A face that reacts in a scene saying, ‘I know what this is about’ is miles away from the look that says, ‘I cannot comprehend this.’ The actor’s gesture is minimal, but everything is in the tiniest inflection. That’s what we sought.”
Of enormous importance, says Redford, was the decision to base the production on Chicago’s North Shore, away from Hollywood. It allowed for intimacy and independence, two critical elements of his debut. Several people, including Diller and Pollack, had suggested they visit the location to consult, but he had said no. Three months later, convening with editor Jeff Kanew at Paramount to view the first assembly, Redford felt immensely satisfied with his decision. Stuart Rosenberg, an early viewer of the finished product, quite liked the movie. Sydney Pollack, for whom Redford organized a private screening, liked it, too, but disliked the depiction of Beth. To Redford he said plainly, “The woman doesn’t work”—which, says Redford, might as well have been, “The movie doesn’t work.” Pollack believed Moore was “clumpy and obvious” and unable to rise above her Mary Richards image. Says Redford, “He felt I’d made a grievous error of judgment casting her. I was hurt, but I had belief. I knew I had a good cut; it worked beautifully with the Pachelbel. I finished the movie and then I headed for the hills.”
In January 1979, during the edit, Betty Webb, his grade school sweetheart, now a New Age counselor, visited with Bill Coomber’s wife, Lucrecia, and found “a vastly changed man.” Her memory was of the bright-eyed competitor, suave and determined to best any competition. He was now soft-spoken, even “subdued.” Redford, in fact, judged it otherwise. “There’d been a long buildup of emotional issues. By the time I had locked down Ordinary People, which carried its own high toll, I was dumb with tiredness.”
“After Ordinary People, his Hollywood world became more accessible to us kids,” says Shauna, who, at that point, was studying art at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Previously he had kept us away from it. Now the boundary came down. It was as if, with the movie, he’d at last expressed his true art and that Hollywood was finally a positive thing.” But Amy, just ten, still found an obstacle in the relentlessness of her father’s fame: “It just got bigger and more demanding. I was arts oriented, too, and I wanted to work close to him. But with the time pressures on him, it was hard to get enough personal time.” Within a few years, teenage Amy would break ranks, shave half her head, stud her ears with rings and flee to England to study acting “and objectify things for myself, to get a grip on real life and real people.” Stan Collins saw Redford struggle to hold his family together. “But it wasn’t like it used