Stephen Schiff

“Redford may not yet know what he wants out of visual and narrative style, but he understands actors. And what gives Ordinary People the poignancy it has isn't Pachelbel or autumn leaves or truisms about showing your emotions -- it's the performances of Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore….

“Most remarkable of all, however, is Mary Tyler Moore, whose portrayal of a Lake Forest ice princess is so cool, brittle, and nasty that it borders on the perverse. By all rights, Beth should not seem a villain. Her inability to express emotion is a reflection of her son's, and because she's a hopeless case, the filmmakers would like us to pity her. But the ear-to-ear smile of Mary Tyler Moore is too familiar, too comfortable and practiced to seem the panoply of an Illinois housewife. It's a star's smile, intense and ferocious, and when we detect hatred or duplicity beneath it, it's so powerful that it comes to seem evil: the deceptive grin of a monster. [I don't see Beth as calculating.] This is a distortion, of course. Neither Guest nor Sargent and Redford ever meant Beth to be so remote and unsympathetic. But Moore's been telling interviewers recently that she wants to break out of the Mary Richards mold, wants to stop being America's sunshine girl. And that yearning has given her acting here a wicked vitality that you welcome, especially in so limp a film. The ironclad smile of a housewife--of an ordinary person--would surely crumble, or at best strain, under the pressure the Jarretts experience. But Mary Tyler Moore may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

Stephen Schiff
Boston Phoenix, Sept. 23, 1980

[I would have to give a concurring opinion; that is, I agree with the praise if not his judgment of the character.]