A Rare Karmer vs. Kramer Review

Imagine, finding Meryl in a Philippine English book! That was heaven to me, but I realized it just now. When I got my college English book, Reading Into Writing 2 by Concepcion Dadufalza, I was reading through all the selections and I came across a Kramer vs. Kramer review (probably it was written around the time of the movie) and I did not mind it, being indifferent to Meryl Streep or Dustin Hoffman (during that time, I already know Meryl through TDWP but technically, she does not exist in my world) Yesterday, I stumbled upon the book and read it again, and was really amazed of the treasure that I got. Really a rare finding for a dedicated Streeper.

So, no more of my blabbings. Here’s the selection itself:

KRAMER VS. KRAMER. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep

Directed by Robert Benton. Columbia Pictures

David Derby

Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep), a Manhattan housewife, perhaps 30 years old, kisses her sleeping child (“I love you, Billy”, she says) and then packs her bag to go. At the same time, her husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman), who is an advertising art director, is receiving a promotion form his boss. Exultant, he rushes home, and she hits him full in the face with it. “I’m leaving you”, she says, without anger, and lays her keys and credit cards – the bonds of modern marriage, in the table. Ted, who’s accustomed to having things his own way, tries to make her stay and talk it over, but before he knows what’s happened, she whirls out of his grasp, disappears into the elevator, and their marriage is over.

The opening scenes of the extraordinary Kramer vs. Kramer are certainly abrupt, yet they seem absolutely right. Isn’t this the way many marriages end these days? A lot of silent suffering, then a sudden collapse. We don’t know what’s wrong with Joanna, but we can see that she’s bouncing off the walls of her grey-beige East Side apartment like a moth inside a silk lampshade. When she say she’s had it, that’s right. Writer-director Robert Benton has made something very exciting out of Avery Corman’s 1977 bestseller. The Corman book was an impersonally written piece of manufacture, a bland, journalistic novel about mediocre people. But the Benton movie is a major dramatic work – startling, emotionally involving, with characters that are now larger and finer in every way.

The man Joanna walks-out on is a hyperactive go-better, a self-absorbed business success  – not a bastard, but a stunned product of the corporate age – who had never listened to his wife or noticed that she was unhappy. Dazed, ted turns to his son Billy – whom he never really saw either, and falls completely in love with him. If we can speak of a passion of parenthood, that movie has it. Billy becomes Ted’s solace, his revenge, his glory. And taking car of his son tuned Ted into a full human being for the first time. But just when he’s learned to be a good daddy, Joanna returns (it’s 18 months later) and demands custody, forcing a court battle of horrifying ruthlessness.

The courtroom scene is perhaps the greatest test of Benton’s honor as a filmmaker and as a man, because the temptation to turn Joanna into a annihilating bitch must have been strong. But Benton is too shrewd for that – he rejects polemics in favor of understanding. He makes Joanna highly sympathetic. As she explains, tearfully at first, then proudly, she needed to go off and find her self-confidence and a professional identity before she could feel adequate as a mother. She makes her claim on Billy, and Ted makes his: Why shouldn’t a single man have as much right as a woman to bring up a child? The claims balance out; there is no “just” solution: Kramer vs. Kramer, quite unintentionally I think, is a tragic and ironic summing-up of the decade of self-realization and women’s liberation. Sex and marriage have failed for the Kramers. The newly confident woman and the newly sensitized man are propelled from each other. In the end, they are both adequate parents, but they cannot make a family,. I know this is a very square stuff – but the moral realism and decency of it are truly heroic.

Robert Benton who wrote (with David Newman) Bonnie and Clyde and directed Bad Company and The Late Show was once an art director and a moving spirit of the slickest and the most cynical of the great American magazines – the Esquire of the early 60’s. As much as anyone now working in the movies, Benton is aware of the traps of sincerity – the ways that well-meaning writers and filmmakers can make fools of themselves. Yet this fear and hatred of sentimentality haven’t paralyzed him. Quite the contrary: Every notion in Kramer is fully felt, fully supported. Benton clears away the muck of bad movies (too much music, “lyrical”, photography, unnecessary locations), and his rigorous simplicity brings us closer to the characters. The script is classically structured, with repeating motifs and symmetries (for instance, three contrasting scenes of Ted and Billy eating together), yet every scene says tightly focused on mood and feelings, and the editing weaves the brief, highly pointed episodes into powerfully sustained progression.

Who could have imagined that so impassioned a work could have been out of the banalities of child rearing? Working with Justin Henry, a serious and beautiful seven-year-old who had never acted before, Dustin Hoffman gives the most detailed, the most affecting performance of his life. Hoffman’s personality, his soul, has always been expressed in physical energy. At first, his Ted Kramer is all nerves – everything he does is fast, jerky, slammed out. Wound up tight, Hoffman delivers such a fatuous male sentiments as “I’m the one bringing home the bacon around here” with so much hysteria under the surface that you can’t hate poor Ted; he’s macho fool, the triumphant husband and father whose fortress has accountably collapsed. As Ted begins to understand Billy a little, Hoffman moves into a slower rhythm and deeper emotions. He gets away with a teary scene in which he explains that Mommy left because she couldn’t stand him, Ted, and not because she was mad at Billy – and gets away with it by underplaying and be making us concentrate on Ted’s decency in sparing the boy pain. In this contemporary Doll’s House, the emphasis isn’t on the exasperated woman who walks out but on the feeling of the man who’s left behind. Some women, I imagine, may object: Until men began doing it, few people thought raising a child was a dramatic enough subject for a movie. Yet even if you dislike seeing so much made out of Ted’s parental ardor (I didn’t), you have to admire the fluency, the heat, of Hoffman’s acting.

Meryl Streep, of course, doesn’t get the plummy, heartwarming moments. It’s not her movie, but she ennobles it with her cool, nonactressy radiance. Her beauty is still mysterious for us – the sharply stenciled brow, the small precisely cut features seem almost Minoan in their strangeness. At first, Benton uses her as a kind of icon. The opening shot – a close- up as she says goodbye to Billy and Ted from behind a window, she looks witchlike, sinister. But in the climactic courtroom scene the mystery drops away. Her Joanna is not demonic, just restless in the modern way. She left her child because she was betraying herself: now that she possesses her own identity (her high-salaried job is a bit miraculous, but we’ll let that pass), she wants him back. Joanna’s jargon-ridden language is banal, but the feeling, the mixture of guilt and pride, is not, and Streep, avoiding all the traditional acting clichés of frustrated mother love, builds the emotion to a peak without ever raising her voice.

Benton makes the courtroom frightening and morally squalid. First Joanna testifies, then Ted’s sympathetic next-door neighbor (Jane Alexander), then ted himself. With murderous skill the opposing lawyers tear the witnesses apart, using their best qualities against them (for instance Ted’s devoting so much time to Billy that he loses his job)/ We’re meant to feel outraged by the lawyers’ brutalities and also outraged by the way Ted’s boss strings him along dumps him in the crucial moment. Kramer is so wrenching because it demonstrates clearly enough that the “public” world is heartless, even vicious, yet it also shows that the private world – the family – often doesn’t work anymore. What’s left is the lovely spectacle of father and child propping each other up.

So, in other words, he’s saying the film deserves its top Oscars. And he was really impressed my Meryl’s fluidity and vagueness. She does not let us see her as a bitch, just a problematic woman. And though I hate Dustin Hoffman for slapping Meryl, I have to agree with David Derby that he did his part well, and deserve any honor he gets from it.