Kramer vs. Kramer at 35
People get married. Half of them get divorced. Kramer vs. Kramer is a 1979 film about the effects of divorce on a man and his 8-year-old son whom he is now struggling to get to school on time, feed, and pay sufficient attention to while maintaining his career and figuring out why his wife left him in the first place. I loved this film when I first saw it in high school and my memory of it was that it was a comedy with many laugh out loud moments. While there are definitely a few of those moments, the laughs usually are because a situation is so awkward that one just has to laugh to in order to break the tension. In 1979, (according to a 2007 New York Times article by Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers called "Divorced From Reality") about 22.8 out of every 1,000 married couples were getting divorced. Another interesting statistic from the same article is that only 53% of marriages that took place between 1975 and 1979 lasted 25 years when the authors’ census had taken place. So while Kramer vs. Kramer is ahead of its time in displaying family conflict typically avoided in mainstream Hollywood films, it’s also completely of its time, since divorce was becoming so “popular” and less taboo.
Perhaps that’s why screenwriter/director Robert Benton chose this successful novel by Avery Corman to adapt into the highest-grossing and Best Picture Oscar-winning film of 1979. Benton, who has a much more impressive repertoire as a screenwriter than director, tried desperately to cast fresh-faced New Hollywood movie stars as the leads in this bedroom/courtroom drama. Jon Voight and Al Pacino turned down the role as Ted Kramer, ultimately and wonderfully played by Dustin Hoffman. Jane Fonda and Goldie Hawn turned down the role of Joanna Kramer, which Meryll Streep took and filmed between shoots of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979). In true Streep fashion, she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role as the fractured deserting mother.
The film was produced by Columbia pictures in 1979, 3 years before Columbia, a subsidiary of Sony, was purchased by Coca-Cola (Columbia), so, tragically, it seemed like divorce was becoming as ordinarily American as Coca-Cola. Hollywood family films usually upheld family values; especially ones rated PG, like Kramer vs. Kramer [1]. But Kramer, set in the 70s, yet scored by Antonio Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concerto of 1725, a baroque piece of chamber music that sounds like something from a Jane Austen adaptation, opens with the unexplained and incomprehensible leaving of a mother after she puts her cherubic son to bed. He says “See you tomorrow…”, she says nothing, closes the bedroom door, packs her bags and leaves the blissfully ignorant son and baffled husband behind in a cloud of tears and confusion. This isn’t a movie about a failed marriage, though. It’s about how a father who has spent too much time at the office is now solely responsible for the raising of his precocious and heart-broken son.
The classic scene of the film is one at the dinner table in which, disgusted by his frozen TV dinner, Billy (the son, played by Justin Henry, the youngest person ever to be nominated for an Oscar until Quvenzhane Wallis won Best Supporting Actress for Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012) leaves the table and takes some ice cream out of the freezer. What follows is one of the funniest, most irritating and most heart-warming scenes between father and son in cinema.
Unbelievably, this scene was improvised by Hoffman and Henry, as was much of the dialogue in the film. Hoffman was going through his own messy separation from his wife, and used some of his real life experiences to ad-lib some of his frustration and disbelief at the dissolution of his marriage. Meryl Streep was also experiencing her own personal tragedy, which fuelled her convincing, simultaneously robotic and emotionally fragile performance. She was recovering from the death of her partner John Cazale (the infamous brother Fredo in the first two Godfather films, Coppola, 1972 & ‘74) and at times her pain seems so real on camera it’s hard to watch. Joanna watches her ex-husband and son kissing good bye in front of Billy’s school from the coffee shop across the street and as the camera captures her through the window as she spies on them, her face is catatonic, unmoving, overcome with grief and regret. She also did some re-writing of Benton’s script for her courtroom testimony scene. Benton, who wrote Bonnie and Clyde (dir. Arthur Penn, 1967), the revisionist screwball comedy classic What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdonavich, 72), and Superman (Richard Donner, 1978), gets the job done as director, but this is a small, closely-shot melodrama, and what he does best is he puts the camera down in one place and lets the actors work out their feelings on film.
There is one large problem with the film: it is incredibly sexist. Ted has a friend who was recently left by her husband and is also raising a child on her own. She admits that she would take her husband back if he begged forgiveness, showing that Benton has no concept of a woman’s independence and sees women as people who need men to properly exist. Also, in the courtroom drama scenes, Joanna is put on the stand and absolutely torn apart by Ted’s lawyer who all but calls her a slut on the stand. “How many relationships have you had?” he screams at her as she’s shredded to tears and near hysteria.
This doesn’t come across as a mere portrayal of one unfit mother, but seems more like the venting of hatred for all women and was extremely difficult to endure, much like the titular scene of agony in Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982). Somehow, though, the scenes of tenderness between Ted and Billy are so touching and well acted that it makes up for this major flaw and I didn’t leave the film with a terrible taste in my mouth.
Kramer vs. Kramer is a tearjerker and a journey from dysfunction and panic to growth and acceptance. In the first ten minutes of the film, one can feel Dustin Hoffman’s anxiety as he tries and fails to make French toast for his son’s breakfast the night after his wife leaves. By the end of the film (18 months later), he and Billy have it down. They’ve learned how to work together instead of fighting each other. They are making it work despite the pain. While I’m not a child of divorced parents (my parents have been married for 38 years), true to statistics, about half of my friends are. I’ve seen the grief and pain that comes along with divorce, and have always been grateful that I never had to choose with whom I would rather live or get used to one of my parents just not being there anymore. But, I’ve also seen that for most of these friends, life goes on. Now, in my 30s, I have friends who have been divorced and remarried and the stigma of divorce is not what it once was. Kramer vs. Kramer does a great job showing that while it is of course difficult, being a successful single parent isn’t impossible. Even though it’s about death, not divorce, I was reminded at times of Tom Hanks’ line in Sleepless In Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993) as he explains how he copes with the loss of his wife to late-night radio show host Dr. Marcia Fieldstone: “I’m going to get out of bed every morning, breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won’t have to remind myself to get out of bed and breathe in and out all day. And, then after a while I won’t have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.”
by Kenny Meier
[1] I was confused by the PG rating, because there is an extended scene of full frontal nudity, but while reading trivia facts about the film on IMDB.com, I discovered that the nude bits were optically darkened for theatrical showings but not for video releases.
