Episode 25: ORDINARY PEOPLE with Mark Harris

Published: July 28, 2021, 10:30 a.m.

Someone notorious for snatching the Best Picture trophy from the boxed gloves of RAGING BULL, ORDINARY PEOPLE is the rumbling domestic drama about an upper class family — starring Donald Sutherland, Timothy Hutton, and Mary Tyler Moore, and Judd Hirsch as the therapist Hutton begins to see — about the fall apart from the pain no one will acknowledge and the roles no one is good at playing. Its precisely selected food moments articulate a unit at the breaking point and a questioning, too, of the legacy of white suburban familial “happiness” in cinema. Writer and Oscar aficionado Mark Harris, the author of MIKE NICHOLS: A LIFE and PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION, joins us to discus how something as small as unwanted Fence toast can set off a chain reaction of events in a single family. We also play a game of Sounds Like a Suburban Snack to Me and discuss what’s giving us Lasagna Time feels this week.