Extraordinary people

Rating: 8/10 (22 May 2019)

Calvin Jarrett(Donald Sutherland) finally takes a side, his surviving son's side, and stops making excuses for Beth(Mary Tyler Moore). Conrad(Timothy Hutton) was right; he, too, can see it now. Beth Jarrett is not an ordinary person. When did his wife become unknowable? Donald Sutherland, whose previous role was that of a San Francisco health inspector in Phillip Kaufman's 1979 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", famously shrieks and points at a woman, a human, in the film's final scene. Nancy(Veronica Cartwright) finds out too late that Dr. Matthew Bennell turned into a pod person. This time, the woman gets to be the pod. And although "Ordinary People", Robert Redford's 1980 debut film, is not a genre picture, an element of horror, the human sort, makes Beth's demeanor all the more bloodcurdling, because here, the dramaturgy at work is the human condition, a precept of allegory. Calvin, who loves Conrad and his deceased son Buck in equal proportion, sees the vacancy in her eyes when her surviving child stoops down to give his seated mother an unreciprocated hug in the living room. Sutherland doesn't point and scream like a banshee, but the father's silence is a judgement, the same as the health inspector: You are not one of us. In the Kaufman film, a half-awake Dr. Bennell fights a losing fight against sleep, which as a result, turns him into a plant-based replica. Calvin, conversely, is half-asleep, always willing to give Beth the benefit of the doubt, explaining to his son's therapist(Judd Hirsch) that she loves Conrad, but has a hard time expressing it. Now, however, both eyes are wide open, an eyewitness, he is, to Beth's shortcomings; a blank face, a telling projection of her maternal disconnect to an atoning son's show of affection. She doesn't love Conrad. Later that night, Beth packs her suitcase. The marriage is over. "I don't know who you are anymore," he says. Neither does Beth. Calvin was right when he tells Dr. Berger that the best of his wife was buried with Buck. Reminiscent of Bryan Forbes' "The Stepford Wives", the Christmas shopping sequence shows Beth, in her element, a mall, saying "hello" from an escalator to a friend on another escalator going the opposite direction, seemingly happy. In the next scene, we realize that she's going through the motions. In a high-end clothing shop, Beth stares at, or rather, stares through a mannequin outfitted in a sparkly red dress. "May I show this in your size?" the saleslady asks the perfect homemaker, who slinks away in embarrassment, laughing at the woman's inquiry, as if trying on a slinky red thing was the most ridiculous thing she ever heard of. There is nobody left to get dressed up for. That mannequin, so lifeless, so much like a corpse, and headless, Beth recognizes as her old self, the life of any party, who escaped from the cemetery. Sure, she still gathers by the piano with other high society ladies, singing alongside them at exclusive soirees, laughs on cue at unfunny jokes told by stodgy captains of industry, and always knows the right thing to say in public before her class-conscious friends, but it's not her. Nobody can tell that she's a robot on the fritz. Nobody can tell that somebody attached her head to a new body.
Annie Graham(Toni Collette), wife and mother, a seemingly ordinary person, just like Beth Jarrett, loves her two children disproportionately. It's hereditary, the Robert Redford film and this debut feature by Ari Aster, but the Grahams are not ordinary people, in spite of Annie's best efforts to shield her loved ones from the Leigh family history of mental health issues. Starting with her mother, Ellen, whose funeral, in the aftermath, inspires Annie to remark "should I be sadder?" back home with her stalwart husband Steve(Gabriel Byrne), and ending with herself, who once tried to set her son on fire. Sleepwalking, the mother was, but ever since the miniaturist artist doused kerosene on Peter(Alex Wolff), coming perilously close to setting him ablaze with the strike of a match, he presumed, correctly, as it turns out, that his younger sister Charlie(Milly Shapiro) was Annie's favorite. In "Ordinary People", the husband accuses Beth of needing life to be "neat and tidy". Similarly, Annie's miniatures, based on her real life as a wife and mother, recreations of familiar interiors and familiars, are static, like establishing shots frozen in amber. "Small World", Annie's upcoming show, is emblematic of "neat and tidy", "mess"-free domestic dioramas; a projection of what Calvin accuses his wife of wanting; no family crises. Beth was a private person; she didn't want people knowing her business. And Annie, likewise, reveals nothing in her art that she doesn't want the world to see. For example, hours after her Ellen Leigh's funeral, she tells Charlie: "Grandma wouldn't let me feed you because she wanted to feed you," while tucking her in for the night. Translated into miniature art, Annie uses her creative license to change history. While her mother stands bedside looking feeble and adrift with her breast lay bare, Annie is in charge, feeding Charlie. But all artists are liars. If the figurines possessed fluidity, the observer would see two partially-exposed women fighting over nursing rights. The manifestation of Ellen's ghost in the spare room, Annie can sense, relates to Charlie, which is why she faces the the bedroom scene away from her. The mother knows that Ellen is coming after her granddaughter, but how?
Annie is Heracles, the Greek figure who thinks he has control over his own destiny, ignoring all the signs that propose otherwise. Peter's English teacher defends Heracles, which has the effect of absolving Annie from being arrogant, because "Sophocles wrote the oracle so that it was unconditional." There are signs. She sees her mother's ghost; she knows that the door to Ellen's bedroom should be closed, but still denies the presiding matriarch's presence over the family. A second class is in session, concurrently; Charlie's class, the one with Satan as an unaccounted-for pupil. At her desk, Peter's sister works on a doll, the more pressing concern, than the teacher's quiz, because life as she knows is almost over. And so it begins, fate's first move against the "pawns in a hopeless machine". A blackbird's progress ends in a crash against the classroom window. It's fatal flight draws Charlie's classmate to the smeared glass, except for Charlie, who eyes the scissors on her teacher's desk, instead. The blackbird loses its head. Charlie loses her head. Ellen's young protege knew that she'd be decapitated, but not how, when, or where. Grandma was a practicing Satanist. What looks like a series of convolutions that leads to Charlie's beheading: Annie's insistence that Peter should bring his sister to a house party; the presence of walnuts in the chocolate cake that flares up Charlie's allergies; the swelled neck that restricts her breathing which leads to a rolled-down window and protruding head, was, in actuality, preordained, because the occult language is inscribed on the telephone pole's surface. The accident was foretold. That's the devil. In "Ordinary People", the row boating tragedy was forewarned. Conrad admits to Dr. Berger that they should have known better; there were gathering storm clouds brewing. That's God.
Conrad Jarrett should have been the drowning victim, not survivor. To her credit, Beth never comes out and says that. There is no direct expression of a mother's choice. Annie, on the other hand, admits as much in her nightmare, a two-fold dream told with visuals then words, in which we learn how her art, so seemingly objective is not so objective, after all; it just obfuscates her subjective point-of-view. Annie's dream starts like this: She awakens to black ants on her bedsheets; ants that form a trail to her son's room. The mother, we already know, can't forgive Peter, because she said so in a family dinner that went off the rails. The mother looks agonizingly over the ants covering the whole of her son's face, knowing that this was Charlie's roadside condition, a makeshift ant colony. Annie recreates a miniature of her daughter's death. This nightmare is the subtext of that installation. Whereas Beth shouts: "Buck wouldn't be in a hospital!" as a way of intuiting her preference that Conrad had been the body in the casket, Peter's mother is more on-point. Annie's dream folds into another dream: She wakes up from sleepwalking; she tells her son: "I never wanted to be your mother." Peter would have been an abortion if not for Ellen's intervention. But both mother and son misunderstood the night of the attempted murder. Peter was sleeping in the wrong bed. Charlie, in accordance with church dogma, was slated for death. In "Ordinary People", Beth treated Buck like a God, but it's Conrad who possessed a sort-of god-like strength to have held onto the boat. Deep within her subconscious, because evil is "Hereditary", Annie knew that Peter was a vessel for Paimon, one of the eight kings of hell. That's why the match remained unlit.
"Hereditary", arguably, is "Ordinary People" retold as a horror film. The Grahams are extraordinary people. Instead of personal demons, the family has actual demons in them; the devil inside. Both mothers don't like messes. Beth was a housewife; her counterpart, an artist. Annie, like Beth in that small boutique, can't go through the motions any longer. Conrad's mother needed her husband to snap her out of it. Annie, a modern woman, does it herself. "I am not sleepwalking anymore," she yells at Steve over the phone, and smashes her latest installation, a recreation of Ellen's funeral, to pieces. She can't pretend any longer that it was an unhappy event. She tells the truth, finally. Annie's art was a corrective measure to her life. She makes a mess. Now her art is true-to-life.