Kramer vs. Kramer is 1979's heartbreak hit
Kramer vs. Kramer is a rare movie that finds its tone, its focus and its poetry in its very first image. The image: a close-up of an anguished woman, her face surrounded by darkness. The shot is so intimate that the audience at first yearns for some relief. But the relief never really comes. Kramer vs. Kramer is composed almost entirely of actors' faces, of intense passions and of winter light.
Since the actors are Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, and since the suffering is real, the audience quickly finds that it is impossible to turn away.
As moviegoers will discover when the film opens in December, Kramer vs. Kramer is the emotional bender of the year.
Director-Writer Robert Benton and his cast have made their own Scenes from a Marriage—a domestic drama that starts at a wrenching pitch and builds and builds to the threshold of pain. Yet the film is not imitation Bergman; it is, above all, peculiarly American. Adapting a popular novel by Avery Corman, Benton tells an unpretentious story that might well have served such vintage Hollywood tearjerkers as George Stevens' Penny Serenade and King Vidor's Stella Dallas.
Kramer is about what happens when an unhappy wife walks out on her husband and six-year-old son, only to return 18 months later to fight for custody of the child. What happens to this story onscreen is something else again. Though Kramer is satisfying as a timeless tragedy about marital and parental love, it also travels across a minefield of contemporary social issues. The characters are very much citizens of the 1970s; their troubles illuminate the cutting edge of an era when all the old definitions of marriage and family have been torn apart.
It is not, of course, the first film to deal with these issues. A number of American movies have re-evaluated the roles of men and women throughout the decade. The cycle began when Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge and Paul Mazursky's Blume in Love first used comedy to expose the hypocrisies of the bright but sexist American male. After the women's movement took hold, films like Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman went further by trying to spread a new, liberated feminine ideal to a mass audience. Since then, there has been a benign backlash: a series of circumspect films about sensitive, unmarried men. Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's forthcoming All That Jazz are both, in part, self-lacerating accounts of heroes who toy with women to satisfy selfish neurotic needs. Blake Edwards' hit "10" is a touching farce that punctures the childish sexual fantasies of a male-menopause victim. In Starting Over, Burt Reynolds turns from a newly liberated wife to an equally liberated lover; Alan Alda's The Seduction of Joe Tynan tells much the same tale from a more somber perspective.