Kramer vs. Kramer

“Kramer vs. Kramer,” released in 1979, wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is – not as interesting and gripping – if the movie had chosen sides. The movie’s about a problem that is realistic in the chance to choose a side: a divorce and a fight for the custody of a child. However, the important thing in a story like this (in the movies and also in real life) isn’t who’s right or wrong, but if the people involved are able to act the right way to their own better nature. Isn’t it that often the case where we act selfish and mean-spirited at the difficult human problems that require our limited about of goodness?

“Kramer vs. Kramer” is exactly about that sort of problem. It starts with a marriage that has so much unhappiness, ego and selfishness, and ends with two single people who have both learned important lessons about the ways they want to behave. They have their son in the middle – Billy, who is in first grade = but this isn’t a movie about the trouble of the kid but about the trouble of the parents.

Hollywood regularly does stories like this from the offspring’s point of view, showing them upset and ignored by the parents – but what if the parents don’t act like adults? What about a family where everyone still is a kid begging for attention and trying to find out who they are?

That’s exactly what it’s like here. The movie stars Dustin Hoffman as an advertising executive who only thinks about his new account – and he thinks only about that that when he comes home and his wife tells him that she wants a divorce, he barely hears her and doesn’t think she is being serious. However, his wife, played by Meryl Streep, is leaving. She needs time to find out who she is, which is what she claims. To find out the person who also doesn’t know who he is when she tied the knot.

From the start, we feel like we know which side to go on and who to blame: How can she leave her home and son, which is what we ask. However, we can’t exactly ask the question sincerely, because what we’ve already seen from Hoffman is evident as to why she must have wanted to separate. She may be leaving eh family but he’s barely been a part of it. Bullied, not on time, taking his son to school on the first day after his wife left, he asks him: “What grade are you in?” He’s in first, but Hoffman didn’t know.

The movie takes out Streep during the climax, as Hoffman and his son get to know one another, and as Hoffman’s duties as a father eventually make him get fired from his ad agency. These parts are what make the movie really heart-warming. The movie’s writer and director, Robert Benton, has given his characters with dialog that has so much complete everyday precision, but when you look at the son, played by Justin Henry, he and Hoffman appear to have improvised where they thought was needed.

Situations are created after the kid son is more or less left free to respond how he wants, with Hoffman leading and improvising along with him, and many moments have that feeling of off-script real life.

That means is that we can see the father and son learning about each other and getting closer. Another movie might have gone around that, but “Kramer vs. Kramer” stays right on point of that where real people are making real choices. This is true as well when the movie reaches the huge problem: when Streep comes back and says that now she feels ready to claim custody of their son.

By now we don’t know whose side to choose. We feel concerned for the father – we’ve seen him change and grow – but now we are basically looking on as witnesses to the dilemma. The movie has encouraged us to realize that these people are deep and difficult enough, as everyone else is that we can’t give those labels unnecessarily.

“Kramer vs. Kramer” is a movie of excellent performances, and that was a must, because the performances can’t be on unoriginal tragedy. Roger Ebert stated in his review, “Dustin Hoffman's acting is about the best in his career, I think, and this movie should win him an Academy Award nomination and perhaps the Oscar. His performance as Ratso in "Midnight Cowboy" (1970) might strike some people as better than this one, but he had the advantage there of playing a colorful and eccentric character. This time he's just a guy in a three-piece suit, trying to figure out the next 24 hours.” One of his best moments is when he apples for a job during an ad agency’s office Christmas party, and insists on knowing right away.

Ebert credited, “Meryl Streep has certainly been having quite a year, and has appeared in what seems like half the year's best female roles (so far she's been in "The Deer Hunter," "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" and "Manhattan," and "Holocaust" on TV).” In “Kramer vs. Kramer,” Benton asked her to voice her character’s exact case in the main scene when she argues for her child in court. She is persuasive, but also is Jane Alexander, who plays her best friend, and whose character is an eyewitness and witness as Hoffman slowly learns how to be a father.

Ebert noted, “This is an important movie for Robert Benton, who co-wrote "Bonnie and Clyde" and also wrote and directed "Bad Company" and "The Late Show." He spends a great deal of attention on the nuances of dialog: His characters aren't just talking to each other, they're revealing things about themselves and can sometimes be seen in the act of learning about their own motives.” That’s what makes “Kramer vs. Kramer” such an inspirational film: We get those moments where personalities change and decisions are made even as we see them.

This is another one of my favorite films. I really like the realism that they captured because these types of situations exist, realistically speaking. Everyday couples are separating/divorcing, but then come back to fight for the custody of their children(s). If you haven’t seen this movie, stop reading this review. Go out and see this because I highly recommend everyone see this. Especially since we all know those parents who still act like children and they get so much help in order to become adults.

Check in next week for a hilarious comedy and one of the best in “Dustin Hoffman Month.”