Pauline Kael

“…. There's a nasty, almost conscious incestuousness lurking in Beth and never brought to the surface, and even at his most neurotic Conrad is still a "nice boy."…. The movie is just as sanitized as the fantasy of upper-middle-class life it sets out to expose. And it's just as empty and orderly: Calvin has the possibility of becoming a decent, whole person, because he is willing to open himself to Dr. Berger, but Beth, who rejects Calvin'g plea that she also go, is too proud to admit to any weakness or need; shaking uncontrollably at the thought of her life collapsing, she still rejects help, and she is doomed to freeze-dry.

“As this Wasp witch, whose face is so tense you expect it to crack, Mary Tyler Moore also seems to be doing penance for having given audiences a good time. Her idea of serious acting seems to be playing a woman who has a mastectomy (First You Cry, on TV), a suicidal, bedridden quadriplegic (Whose Life Is It, Anyway?, on Broadway), and this self-deceiving woman who cares more for appearances than for her husband and son. Are fine comediennes still to be call courageous for giving performances al locked in dreariness as Carol Burnett's were when she went through her overage-bachelor-woman pregnancy in The Tenth Month and lost her son in Friendly Fire? As Beth, Mary Tyler Moore holds her pinched seriousness aloft like a torch. The fault isn't just in her acting: it's also in the writing and the directing. She has been made into a voodoo doll stuck full of pins. This movie is Craig's Wife all over again: Beth is the compulsively neat, dedicated-to-appearances, unloving Harriet Craig, the perfect wife. But this time as a mother. She is so completely Harriet Craig that I didn't believe it for an instant when she left the house at the end. Even within its own terms, the film goes wrong here. The impersonal, ice-palace house is what Beth is married to--the house is Beth. [What about her golf? as Kael herself earlier pointed out.] It's not for living, it's for show, and it's her proof that everything is just as it should be. Beth would have stayed in her house, like Harriet Craig, and the men would have left. What are they going to do with it, anyway? Invite Dr. Berger in to mess it up and make it homey?

“…. The movie is not above shamelessness: surely we could have been spared the symbolic broken dish and the information that this monstrous woman wouldn't even let her sons have a pet? And when Conrad tries to hug his mother, she sits as straight as a plank of wood, with her eyes wide opin in the timeworn manner of actress demonstrating frigidity. In general, the more emotional the scenes are, the worse they play.

“…. [T]he movie is essentially a simpleminded, old-fashioned tearjerker, in a conventional style. People weep for Beth, who can't change--who can't let herself change. We are given to understand that she would like to come out of her shell but she can't. She's trapped in the pride and discipline and privacy that she was trained to believe in. She was bred not to say what's on her mind. And the movie, which treats her, finally, with sympathy yet holds out no hope for her, makes her seem rather gallant. She seems the last standard bearer for the Wasp culture that the film indicts. With its do-gooders' religion, Ordinary People says that the willingness to accept psychiatry divides people into the savable and the doomed. Yet maybe because the film's banal style speaks to the audience in aesthetically conservative terms, this movie about the hell that uptight people live in somehow turns into a nosegay for WAsp repression. Beth will go down with the ship: she will never "communicate."”

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, October 13, 1980
Taking It All In, pp 80-82