David Denby

“…. Beth… is the ultimate Wasp movie bitch--the mother as snow queen and destroyer. Inhumanly cheerful, yet tight as a drum, she seems to have been raised at a suburban golf club. Having adored the son who drowned, Beth has no love left for the son who lives; she fences him off with smiles while raging silently against him.

“…. We are supposed to look on the Jarretts and think, What a boring, awful life these people lead! . . . . And poor Calvin and Beth--so polite and distant with each other, so melancholy and repressed! They are Poor Little Rich Grownups--heartbreaking.

“Thus the Jarretts and their life. And the movie will work for you if you believe [the Jarretts] really exist. But I cannot. I cannot believe that anybody could be as limited or as restrained or as ignorant of themselves as they are (compare them, for instance, with the quirky Wasp sububanites in John Cheever's stories). Sargent and Redford have drained most of the life out of the Jarretts and then said to us, "See how lifeless they are." The Jarretts are a pop-culture myth that people envious of Wasps, or guilty about being Wasps, want to believe in.

“…. Mary Tyler Moore, holding herself taut with the effort of acting, tries her damnedest to turn her TV character, Mary Richards, inside out, so we can see the panic and desperation under the cheerfulness.

“Moore is effectively piteous, but I think the screenplay treats her character unfairly. Conrad and Calvin Jarrett learn to confront their pain, while Beth continues to deny hers--she won't see Dr. Berger. Yet the two men and the woman are perceived in fundamentally different ways. The men's behavior--denial, then acceptance--is pictured as psychologically plausible, the woman's as a grievous moral failing. Since most people react to pain by denying it, one wonders why Beth was not treated with greater sympathy. She is a villainess out of a morality play, right up there with such unloving mothers as Joanne Woodward in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams and Geraldine Page in Interiors. Of course, if your ideology insists that everyone must confront his demons, a woman who refuses to do so isn't merely a person in deep trouble--she's a monster. In the end, the moviemaker's attitudes aren't nearly as charitable as they seem at first.”

David Denby
New York, September 29, 1980