Best Picture: #52
Original Release Date: December 17, 1979
Rating: PG
Runtime: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Director: Robert Benton
Quick Impressions:
Kramer vs. Kramer has haunted me my whole life—not in the sense that I’ve seen it and found it moving. It was simply Best Picture the year that I was born. (At least, in all those novelty birthday cards and newspapers, online listicles, games, and memes, if you were born in 1979, Kramer vs. Kramer is the Oscar winner inexorably linked with your destiny. Of course, 1978’s The Deer Hunter actually won Best Picture in the Oscar ceremony that took place in 1979, but all of those novelty items and slick data aggregations don’t care about such niceties. Sometimes Oscar ceremonies are best forgotten. Let’s remember the work instead.)
I was pleasantly surprised (almost shocked) by how much I liked this movie. My mother always described it as too sad to enjoy. (Her favorite movie is Pollyanna, though.) I took her word for it. Divorce is a difficult topic. When it’s parent vs. parent vying for the custody of their young child, how joyful could the proceedings be? In the past, it wasn’t easy to decide on a whim, “Let’s watch this particular film,” then stream it instantly on Amazon. So I’ve never sought out Kramer vs. Kramer in the past, and I watched it for the first time with my daughter last week. I should have watched it sooner. (I wish, particularly, that I had seen it before watching Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story.)
The Plot:
Ted Kramer is having a great day. His boss has every confidence in him and has just put him in charge of an important account, positioning him for a big promotion. He rushes home (late) and runs to the phone because he’s got a lot of big calls to make. But then his wife Joanna ruins his moment by announcing that she’s leaving him. Ted’s annoyed by her timing but doesn’t believe that she’s serious. Joanna will be back. After all, she rushed out the door in such a hurry that she left behind her suitcase. Ted’s very irritated with her, and he’s going to tell her so when she returns. But Joanna doesn’t return. She doesn’t return for over eighteen months, and in the meantime, Ted has to figure out how to juggle his career with the demands of being a single parent to his young son Billy, who is, naturally, devastated and bewildered by his mother’s unexpected departure from his life. Adjusting to these new circumstances isn’t easy, but Ted knows his son needs him, and he steps up in a big way, developing a special bond with Billy, making the boy feel loved, safe, happy, and content. Then Joanna returns. And she wants custody.
The Good:
The performances in this movie make it such an engaging watch. Both Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep won their first Oscars for the film (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress) and supporting player Jane Alexander was nominated, too, as was eight-year-old Justin Henry who remains the youngest ever Oscar nominee. I went in knowing about Hoffman and Streep, but Henry was an extremely pleasant surprise. Both my daughter and I repeatedly commented to each other about the strength of his performance as we watched. It’s one thing to be cute and naturally charming and quite another to be giving a legitimately strong performance when so young. I kept saying to my daughter, “This child is incredible! What’s his name? Henry?” And my daughter would say, “I think it’s Billy, but I agree.” This exchange happened approximately 90,000 times. I finally figured out just now why I wanted to call him Henry so much. Yes, the actor’s name is Justin Henry, but Henry is also the child’s name in Marriage Story. (I’m now assuming Noah Baumbach named him that as a nod to actor Justin Henry, but it could be for some other reason.) From what I’ve read, both Hoffman and Streep devoted a lot of time and energy to their interactions with the child, and Hoffman, in particular, workshopped scenes with him. Their work paid off. For someone so young, Henry gives a remarkable performance specifically because it seems both natural and controlled (i.e., he does what a child would do, but there’s no sense that he’s just running around playing while the camera is on him, gathering footage to be restructured into a performance in the editing room). Henry is such an active and useful collaborative participant in every one of his scenes that I marvel he didn’t continue as an actor into adulthood. He’s very gifted. Without him, the movie could still work, of course, because audiences are usually willing to make allowances for the vagaries of small children or animals. But the fact that we don’t have to make such allowances for Henry makes the film even more successful.
Meanwhile, I can’t compliment the work of the two leads highly enough. The film sets up Hoffman’s character Ted to win the audience’s sympathies, and he succeeds so fabulously that by the end, we completely wipe from our minds his early failures as a husband and father. By the time Joanna returns to fight for custody, Streep certainly faces an uphill battle with the audience because based on the strength of Hoffman’s performance, we’re all practically willing to give him custody of our own children. Whatever his faults at the beginning, Ted becomes an exemplary father. His greatest strength is his increasing presence. As played by Hoffman, Ted is there for his son. First he’s just physically there (which means a lot since nobody else is), but as his time as a single dad goes on, the better and better he gets at interacting with his son, creating a loving, stable home environment for him. Based on what we see in the beginning, Ted might not be in the running for World’s Greatest Husband, but he wins World’s Greatest Dad. Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor for Rain Man when I was nine, and his work in that film made a great impression on me. As a kid, though I had only seen a few of his performances, I would have told you in a heartbeat, “Oh yeah, Dustin Hoffman is a great, great actor.” I’ve always had a high opinion of his talents. But his performance in this film just might be my new favorite. In a lot of Hoffman’s best movies, he’s playing a guy who is either startlingly different, or doing something transgressive. (Perhaps being a dad who wants to full custody of the child, even if it hurts his career, is transgressive for the period, too.) But here Hoffman seems ordinary, wholesome, relatable. I wouldn’t have expected such an engaging, charming performance in a custody battle drama (a film I always assumed would be dull and depressing). He’s very good.
Streep is even better because the movie sets us up to dislike her. It really stacks the deck against Joanna. A mother who abandons her child never plays well, and to make matters worse, we don’t see or hear from her for such a long time. Her scenes basically bookend the film (most of which is the story of a man learning to give his son the kind of care the child needs). I’ll go further and say that it’s possible that Streep saves the movie from making a major misstep. I’ve read online that she wrote most of her own lines in those courtroom scenes (because she felt Joanna’s original lines were inadequate). Her time on the witness stand is when I found Joanna most likeable. On paper, the character is easy to dislike, even to dismiss because there’s not much of a defense for her behavior. There’s not much of an argument to be made that she’s done the right thing by abandoning her child. But listening to Joanna explain herself (and seeing the revealing expressions on Streep’s face) gave me pause. Perhaps not surprisingly, I felt sympathy for Joanna only when she was allowed to speak for herself and explain herself. As I watched, I said to my daughter that with a less gifted actress in the role, even that courtroom scene wouldn’t be enough. Without someone as compelling as Streep playing Joanna, we likely wouldn’t have much positive sentiment for the character at all. And after learning that Streep not only played the scene with great sensitivity but wrote most of the lines herself, my sense that the actress is better than the material and saving the story is only strengthened. (It’s so easy just to demonize the mother in order to make the father look better. On his hero’s journey, he just sort of bulldozes right over a woman having a crisis of mental health and of purpose. The film is still kind of set up like this, but Streep’s compelling turn as Joanna lessens the uncomfortable misogyny of the whole concept.)
The movie surprised me a lot by containing so much humor and so many loving depictions of real, every day life for parents in the 1970s. If you removed the painful divorce from the equation and simply retained the middle portion of the film where Billy is bonding with his dad, the audience would think, What a happy little story about parenthood! What a great look a family!
The film also contains a lot of visual symbolism which my daughter loved. She gushed on and on about the way the movie makes visual metaphors of doorways and elevators.
Best Scene, Dustin Hoffman:
Early on, I was blown away by the moment when Ted first attempts to make French toast for his son. For one thing, the moment is so real. I laughed and recalled how many times I’ve made a meal while stressed that’s become increasingly disastrous, just like this one does for Ted. I think every parent will identify with Ted’s frustration and stress in this scene. Whether your significant other has left you or not, if you’re a parent, you can call to mind tons of moments that haven’t matched up with the idea of perfect parenthood embedded in your mind. Plus Hoffman is so good at being in the moment with his son, yet constantly letting us see the emotional subtext that he’s trying (and failing) to hide from his son. Justin Henry is pretty incredible, too.
Best Scene, Meryl Streep:
Since both Streep and Hoffman won Oscars, I thought naming just one Best Scene wasn’t enough. Streep’s best moment comes in the courtroom, when, on the witness stand and under great pressure, Joanna manages to explain herself, why she left, why she’s come back, why she believes she has the right to raise her son. Streep is not only good when she’s delivering her lines (which apparently she also wrote), but she’s also pretty incredible at reacting facially to the unbelievable hostile and unfair attorney who seeks to berate and undermine her whenever possible.
Best Scene, Justin Henry:
You know, I’m going to give Justin Henry a Best Scene, too. Why not! That ice cream challenge is not only funny, but it leads to one of the most effective dramatic moments of the movie. Henry gets bonus points, too, because after watching the film, I learned that he and Hoffman had improvised the entire ice cream scene.
Best Action Sequence:
I can feel Ted’s fear and urgency as he carries Billy across town to the emergency room. Since I don’t live in New York, the idea of carrying someone to the emergency room is so foreign to me. Here in Texas, the fastest way to get to the hospital would never be on foot (unless you’re stealth camping in the parking lot Nomadland style).
Best Scene Visually:
Meryl Streep stares with such intensity as Joanna stealthily checks in on her son at school. (It’s almost scary!)
The Negatives:
Even though Streep does what she can to humanize Joanna, the fact that a woman would have to be humanized in the first place is deeply problematic. This movie sets up Joanna as a villain. The fact that in the beginning she is clearly having a mental health crisis is never satisfactorily addressed (except briefly in court when it’s used against her). Is it wrong to abandon your son for almost two years? Yes. But Joanna tells us herself that she didn’t believe she could care for him and didn’t know what would happen. It is much better to leave your son in the care of his father than to lead him into uncertain peril in an insecure environment, or (worse) to kill him and yourself out of desperation. Where is the sympathy for Joanna? In court, the only person who shows her any kindness is Ted (and this feels kind of manipulative, like the movie wants to show us that he really is a great guy just as we suspect). Yes, Ted took care of his son for eighteen months. But Joanna makes quite a good point when she said she took care of him for over five years. Does that count for nothing? And the way she left him was very responsible. She left him in a secure environment with a stable parent. And she wrote to him. Yes, it’s heartbreaking when Hoffman reads her letters out loud because we know that he knows what they say is such a terrible blow to his child. But if somebody says, “I cannot take care of you,” perhaps we should believe her. (You can’t really be outraged that someone would kill her children in a psychotic break and just as outraged that someone would step away from her children when not feeling capable of caring for them. That’s not fair.) I think the film sort of demonizes Joanna, which is galling because this is done in order to make Ted look better. He becomes a better man, and his wife is dragged through the mud to make it happen. (Marriage Story does a similar thing, but then there’s a late turn that let’s us see some weaknesses in the husband that may have motivated the wife.)
I’ve also read that Hoffman behaved abominably to Streep onset. I know they were not friendly for many years. Supposedly he was pretty brutal to get the performance he wanted from her. From his point of view, he was helping her to give the best performance possible (but even that’s a bit condescending isn’t it? Perhaps Streep is capable of giving the performance she wants without having wine glasses hurled at her or her recently dead lover’s name whispered in her ear). Hoffman’s performance is fantastic, but if the way he supposedly behaved toward Streep on set is true, that’s…disappointing.
Actually, I think my daughter had greater insight about the mechanics of this film (and its failings) than I did. She said that Kramer vs. Kramer and other movies like it (e.g. Marriage Story, other films about custody battles) are not entirely honest with the audience. They don’t play fair. They make us think that we, as viewers, must decide which side we support, that our decision matters. So we sit and listen. We agree now with Hoffman, now with Streep. We allow ourselves to be persuaded by compelling arguments. But in the end, this is all a bunch of nonsense. It absolutely does not matter which character makes a better case. Custody shouldn’t be decided based on which character the audience likes better or finds more persuasive. It shouldn’t even be decided based on whom the judge likes better. What matters is not the strength of the arguments. What matters are the needs of the child. So we’re offered this story and lured into thinking that our insights have some importance. In reality, the child belongs in the custody not of the most persuasive person, not of the most sympathetic person, but of the person who can provide the best home for the child. Sometimes, we can’t really know this. Even the child doesn’t know. But my daughter is right. The back-and-forth element of these types of movies puts us in the mindset that someone must be right, so some other must be wrong. (At the end of this one, we think, “That parent made the mature decision. The other person was the right parent. We’re sure.”) But this is all an illusion, in point of fact, and it bleeds over harmfully into our real lives, where we think we can give a useful opinion about every custody battle we encounter in the real world. That’s not how it works.
Overall:
Kramer vs. Kramer is a joy to watch, which really took me by surprise. Justin Henry is Oscar worthy, and Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep won their first Oscars for this film. Don’t write this movie off because you assume it will be sad and boring. Yes, many things that happen are quite sad. A marriage breaks up, and that is sad, of course. But one thing about a custody hearing—it shows that more than one person wants to make a home for a loved child. There are worse things in this world than that.