Ordinary People

Robert Redford's first film as director follows the Jarretts, an affluent suburban family holding themselves together after the accidental drowning of the elder son. The younger boy, Conrad, has come home from a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt, and much of the film takes place in the consulting room of the psychiatrist he begins to see.

It is one of the more honest depictions of therapy on film: the slow building of trust, the resistance, the breakthrough that arrives through feeling rather than insight. Around it sits a study of a mother who cannot mourn, and of a family that would rather manage grief than feel it. Adapted from the novel by Judith Guest.