Comment:

The Movie: 7
Every once in a while the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honors a relatively little film with its highest kudos Kramer vs. Kramer walked away with 5 Oscars in important categories: Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Director, Adapted Screenplay. This used to be a much more common occurrence for Best Picture (How Green Was My Valley, The Best Years Our Lives, Gentleman’s Agreement, Lost Weekend, All About Eve and Marty spring immediately to mind), but in the past 50 years, we have seen fewer such entries (e.g. Annie Hall, In the Heat of the Night, Driving Miss Daisy, The Silence of the Lambs), the Oscars more often going to movies with relatively huge production budgets.

Kramer vs. Kramer was adapted for the screen by its director, Robert Benton, from the novel by Avery Corman (who, coincidentally, wrote the novel Oh, God! - the popular movie featuring George Burns and John Denver.) Corman’s book (1977) is thought to have been instrumental in rethinking child custody issues in the courts.

With not a moment to lose, Benton put out a movie with a major star, Dustin Hoffman, as the second of the two Kramers in the title, and strongly supported by a striking, rather high strung blonde named Meryl Streep, very much at the beginning of her career (with Deer Hunter and Julia behind her). But the movie is nothing without 8 year old Justin Henry in a remarkably natural performance as the younger Kramer, and the focus of everyone’s attention. Justin is so appealing, without that smartass precociousness that Hollywood child actors were once famous for, that we can easily overlook some of the script’s leaps of consciousness (as when Hoffman tries to explain to his son why mommy left, confessing insights not previously in his field of view, so far as we know.)

The plot is pretty straightforward and not unfamiliar to some of us: Ted (Hoffman) has just been given an ad man’s dream account and comes home to his wife, Joanna (Streep), to share the good news. He’s so excited he can barely decipher her words “I’m leaving you.” No ultimatum. Just the last in a series of last straws. He has ignored her as a person for the last time. But it’s not just Ted she leaves, it is also their son Billy (Henry) who’s on the verge of entering the first grade. Joanna feels she is in no emotional shape to attend to the needs of a young child. For that matter, neither is Ted, but he buckles down to the task with attendant exasperation, comedy, and little resistance. With the many tasks of child care that he takes on himself, dismissing, doubtless more out of guilt than anything else, the question of sending Billy off to relatives for a while - what any sane man would do in his place - he quite naturally loses the account before very long. Months later Joanna reappears, feeling buoyed by her holiday and therapist, and sues her now ex-husband for custody of Billy. Take that, you unfeeling workaholic!

Which brings me to my reservations about the movie: its politically motivated predictability. It’s all very well and, no doubt, overdue at the time, that fathers are recognized as loving parents - able, in many cases, to do the parenting thing, even whilst holding a full time job. But the script stacks the deck against Streep (Joanna’s off to California – of all places – to find herself, and does so in just a few months. I can see her biting her nails whenever the camera is not on her.) Add to this Nestor Almendros’ lighting of Joanna as a Madonna (in court at least), which leads us to feel the heavy hand of manipulation. Such things go against the grain set up so nicely by the priceless and artlessly staged scenes between Justin and Dustin, making the final resolution feel like a cheat.

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Leonard Norwitz
September 19th, 2009