(5 of 5)
It's all the intangibles in life that fascinate me . . . not things so trite as workoholics and women's lib. I wanted to avoid making a preachy, polemical film."
Benton gets to have it both ways.
His film offers so valuable a picture of men, women and children of the late '70s exactly because it has avoided polemics. Though the movie has no answers to the questions it raises, it recharges the debate by restating issues in new and disturbing terms, or perhaps in the oldest terms of all: through agonizingly ambiguous human truths. Kramer vs. Kramer may produce more tears than any other film this year, but, more important still, it is also bound to stimulate the most talk.
—Frank Rich