Andrew Sarris

“The sequence everyone talks about in Ordinary People involves mary Tyler moore’s disposal of her son’s French toast down the garbage disposal. There is more genuine horror in that one gesture than in all the bloodletting in Dressed to Kill. But most audiences wait for a reconciliation between mother and son. It never comes. This alone makes Ordinary People one of the most audacious movies in recent years. The tragic headlines about Mary Tyler Moore’s real-life son add a Perandellian overcast to the proceedings, but there is no need for this morbid overkill. Every parent I encounter has been wiped out by Ordinary People, and almost every such parent has a similar horror story in his or her family. Much of Ordinary People is glib and simplistic, but the implacability of the Mary Tyler Moore’s mother character from Timothy Hutton’s suicidal-son character is as commendably anti-cliché as anything on the screen in years….”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, November 5-11, 1980

Sarris placed Moore at the top of his year’s-end list of the best actresses of 1980. (Village Voice, date?)