Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [172]
Redford lamented the obligations of work and felt that “[Lola and I] were fulfilling our goals and, at the same time, measuring the distance between us.” When Lola enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont to restart her education and begin building an independent life—a situation that coincided with Ordinary People—the sense of finality was unavoidable.
In the spring, with The Electric Horseman playing to receptive audiences and Brubaker set for a nationwide summer opening, Redford tried to balance himself by taking a road trip, exactly as he’d often done throughout the fifties and sixties. Supping with the kids in Denver, he decided to rent a car to drive solo to New York. “I wanted to recover normal human reality because Ordinary People brought me to that place. But there was no meeting the common man. There was just meeting the fan, the woman with the autograph book, the guy who knew the guy who knew your cousin, the endless handshakes, like I was one of those guys who walked on the moon.”
In high summer Ordinary People opened with a showcase western premiere in Provo. Mary Tyler Moore and Tim Hutton were among Redford’s guests at Sundance for the weekend. Moore, battling the ravages of incipient alcoholism, stayed at the A-frame, which was now a guest lodge under the shadow of the Big House. Moore just wanted to sleep but “could not believe the social schedule Bob set up for us. It was worse than any movie call sheet. It was horse riding at 9:00 a.m. Swimming at 11:00 a.m. Tennis at 1:00 p.m. Go, go, go. I couldn’t keep up. It was worrying. I wondered, How the hell does he keep this pace?”
Ordinary People had been made for $6 million and generated receipts of $115 million, an astonishing success by any criteria. Pauline Kael continued to disapprove of Redford’s work, chastising the director’s emotional absence and the mood of “suburban suffocation,” an extraordinary indictment, given the subject matter. But Jack Kroll in Newsweek applauded direction that was “clean and clear in style, drenched with seriousness and sensitivity.” And Vincent Canby in The New York Times welcomed a film “so good, so full of first-rate feeling, that it would be presumptuous for a critic to re-edit it.” The awards followed. By January 1981 Ordinary People was the acknowledged movie of the year, winning an award from the Directors Guild and snagging British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations and, ultimately, six Academy Award nominations, among them for best director and best picture, contesting Polanski’s Tess, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Scorsese’s Raging Bull.
“When I saw the awards trail beginning, I caved in,” says Redford. “I just didn’t want it. What I was doing was about personal art, about exploring myself and my audience. I was very proud of the film but I did not desire accolades. It sounds churlish, but I was sated on accolades. There are only so many times you want to be told, ‘This is the best thing since Gone With the Wind’ or ‘You are the best leading man since Moses.’ I thought, Screw this! and disappeared.”
After attending a benefit at the Northwestern Hospital Institute of Psychiatry in Chicago, an invitation that arose from the new friendships he formed making Ordinary People, Redford joined the Brokaws for a long-scheduled six-day skiing trip across Colorado, Utah and Idaho. “I was in terrible shape, drained and emotional from the movie and the end of my marriage. The ironies were terrible. My family had been there from the start. They’d suffered so much waiting for me to do what I wanted to do. And then came the big fulfillment … and then this.”
At Sun Valley in Idaho the depression fogged his thinking. “I was skiing harder and faster, and I pitched myself against this impossible run, going all the way, from top to bottom. I skied it too fast and crashed, a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree tumble.”
He smashed his nose and collarbone and suffered multiple lacerations