(2 of 5)
What makes Kramer stand out, even in this often heady company, is its lack of cant or trendy attitudes of any stripe. Rather than tailor his characters to represent the various party lines of present-day sexual politics, Benton allows the issues to develop freely and inferentially from the unruly passions of his story. Kramer avoids explicit feminist debates, and it does not provide heroes or villains of either sex. By such omissions, it departs dramatically from films like An Unmarried Woman and Alice, which feature warm, wholly sympathetic heroines and men who are usually either bastards or saints. Kramer also breaks with nearly all the other unmarried-women and -men movies by refusing to use infidelity as a catalyst in its plot. Ted and Joanna Kramer are one film couple whose conflicts run so deep that they do not begin and cannot end in the bedroom.
Benton gives his film its depth and complexity by challenging the audience's preconceptions and snap opinions at every turn. The process begins with the opening scenes. When Joanna tells Ted she is walking out, the film is, for a while, completely on her side. Joanna is sensitive, beautiful and demonstrably deprived of her own identity. Ted is a cagey, unfeeling Madison Avenue adman who cares only about the big account he has just landed. Ted is so self-absorbed that he cannot believe that Joanna is really miserable enough to leave him. As she waits for the elevator in the hallway of the Kramers' East Side highrise, Ted talks only about himself. Finally he tries to yank the fragile Joanna back into their apartment, as if sheer force were enough to mend their split. "Please don't make me go in there," pleads Streep, her voice nearly a deathly whisper. She pulls away from her husband with such revulsion that no one watching her could fail to share her desperation to escape.
By that point, Ted Kramer would seem to be an irredeemable monster, but Kramer will not allow the audience any rushes to judgment. No sooner has Joanna left than Benton starts to direct sympathy to Ted, who must now go about the business of raising his son alone. Forced again to choose between the demands of his career and his responsibilities at home, the hero does not make the same mistake twice. At first tentatively, and then wholeheartedly, he throws himself into his relationship with his son Billy (Justin Henry). As he does so, Kramer offers a spectacle that is rare in both life and movies: a seemingly set character working fiercly into a new identity.
Usually films contain such transformations only for plot purposes, and they achieve them by fast jumps forward in time. Benton instead undertakes the tough task of putting Ted's changes onscreen, bit by painstaking bit.
This is accomplished in a series of extraordinary scenes between Hoffman and Henry that form the entire middle stretch of the movie and well illustrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that "action is character." Together these two actors—one a movie star, the other a little boy with no previous acting experience—create what is probably the most credible father-son relationship ever seen in an American film. As Ted and Billy slowly come to terms with each other, there is none of the cuteness or sentimentality that so often clots movies about parents and children.