1980 was a pretty heavy year for the Oscars. Apocalypse Now, All That Jazz, Norma Rae, Being There, The Black Stallion, The China Syndrome, even Alien and The Muppet Movie among the nominees. But overshadowing all of these ultimately with wins in five of the major categories was a little drama called Kramer vs. Kramer, about a single father’s relationship with his young son and subsequent custody battle with his ex-wife. It’s the kind of low-stakes adult drama that was commonplace studio filmmaking in the 1970s, very character-focused and engaged with modern social themes. So it is both a little strange and very telling that it managed to walk away with Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, and Adapted Screenplay on Oscar night. Against the original satire of Being There, the grand madness of Apocalypse Now, the enigmatic beauty and humanism of All That Jazz? How?
Kramer vs. Kramer was written and directed by Robert Benton, co-screenwriter of Bonnie and Clyde, What’s Up Doc?, and Superman, adapted from the novel by Avery Corman. Initially this too was just set to be a writing job, with apparently of all people François Truffaut set to direct –but he was off making The Green Room and Love on the Run and suggested Benton direct himself. Benton had previously directed a couple well-received movies, Bad Company and The Late Show, so he wasn’t out of his depth here; but the movie is notably carried more by its writing.
Dustin Hoffman, Benton’s only choice, plays Ted Kramer, a New York workaholic ad executive who is neglectful of both his unfulfilled, depressed wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) and their seven-year-old son Billy (Justin Henry). At the beginning of the movie just as he gets the big new promotion he’s been gunning for, a frustrated and miserable Joanna walks out, leaving him to take care of Billy for the first time in his life. Predictably, the relationship is very strained and impersonal at first as each adjusts to the new dynamic, but of course it grows and develops into something more meaningful as Ted dedicates more time and emotion to his relationship with Billy –albeit directly at the expense of his career. But then Joanna comes back, remorseful for what she did to Billy, and the two go to court over his custody.
The template for later films dealing with the themes of divorce and custody, not least of which Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story –it’s clearest modern analogue, Kramer vs. Kramer works hard to approach the subject with consideration and empathy. Which was something very new and novel in 1979. Bearing in mind that divorce generally as a subject was one of those things that was barely permitted discussion in movies up until around a decade prior, especially in the context of everyday American life, and custody battles even less so, this movie deserves some credit for its normalization of the topic. Maybe not so much the “walking out on the family” aspect, but Ted’s single fatherhood is portrayed as just a fact of his circumstance without judgment; and once he and Billy open up to each other, it’s even a healthy example of a single-parent bond. It’s presented in a relatable, middle-class context too which had to mean something at the time. Divorce rates in America were climbing and it was no longer something that could be hidden away -and in that the reality of custody was likewise not something that could be so easily brushed under the rug. The Kramer’s next-door neighbour and close friend of first Joanna and then Ted, Margaret Phelps (Jane Alexander) –who it’s refreshing to see the movie pair her only platonically with Ted- had been through a divorce already and had retained custody of her daughter. It’s not so unusual, but it is still personally devastating, and Benton was able to recognize the kind of identifiable, compelling drama that comes from the situation of a person leaving their partner, of suddenly having to raise a kid by yourself, or of having to fight in court someone you know so personally.
However where the movie can be commended for a certain display of realism and honest sympathy, it can fail on those counts at times too. In particular it falls victim to the tendency of these kind of stories to lay the blame disproportionately at the feet of one partner over the other. Purportedly, Meryl Streep collaborated with Benton to present Joanna in a sympathetic light to the apparent consternation of Hoffman (Hoffman was just in general an asshole to Streep on the set of this movie, supposedly with the intent of bringing out a better performance in her -but ultimately just resulting in her taking a shit-ton of abuse from a man who thought it was appropriate to evoke her then recently-deceased fiancé John Cazale’s name as a means of making her visibly upset). Streep especially found the character as written in the novel to be a sexist trope and not in line with the realism the movie meant to convey. And to her credit, Joanna in the movie is not that -there are several moments that give credence to her point-of-view on her relationship with Ted and her remorse over leaving Billy. But she still is framed in more of a negative light partly just due to the fact so much of the film is presented from Ted’s point-of-view. We don’t see anything of her relationship with Ted or Billy prior to this culmination of years of build-up, we see nothing of her brief time in California, or the guilt that subsumed her enough to come back. We’re told some of it in court, but her own account is drowned out by the vicious tactics of her lawyer to smear Ted -though in fairness Ted’s lawyer is no less petty and unscrupulous. For as much as the movie makes legitimate points about women’s autonomy, the necessity to leave toxic controlling relationships, and forging one’s own path, Joanna is still read as the antagonist; as someone who committed a cardinal wrong and made Ted’s life so much harder, and who now feels entitled to their child. She is what might now be the archetype for so many incel impressions of women.
The movie likewise seems short-sighted in its depiction of the custody battle more generally -which does require drama but at times will indulge the kind of hyperbole that is at odds with the tone of the film leading up to it. So much testimony and argument seem unconcerned with Billy himself and rely a lot on apparent hearsay and irrelevant details -like how Ted’s new job, which he attained fast through force of will after a sudden firing, makes him less money than his old one, though clearly still enough by 1970s standards to comfortably support Billy. There are odd things too, like Ted’s complete reticence to the idea of Joanna spending a day with Billy, as though he could so easily and cleanly be won over; or the unnecessarily binary aspect to the whole proceeding. Joint custody existed as a concept in 1979 and yet the film positions the conflict as though whoever wins Billy gets to keep him entirely for the rest of their life. Maybe if the film adopted more of a limited subjective perspective, it could work (as in this being how the reality is perceived by Ted), but the presentation is fairly omniscient. It seems that in taking on this subject matter for a drama, Benton had to emphatically heighten, misconstrue, or overlook the kinds of things that would render the narrative less cut and dry.
And this is why I thought of Marriage Story a lot while watching this movie; exaggerated in its own ways for sure, but much more grounded in the realities of the process from the perspective of someone who had actually been through it. That’s a movie where truly the sympathies are divided equally between parties, that gets into the severe emotional toll and ugliness of a custody battle without feeling inauthentic, and doesn’t require any kind of grand transgression to have occurred to propel its drama. It perfected what Kramer vs. Kramer attempted.
But this movie shouldn’t be shortchanged. It is more than a dated effort to portray a topic that was becoming for the first time a reality to a high percentage of Americans. Because Kramer vs. Kramer is a good and important movie in its depiction of the father-son bond and caring, committed paternalism. It tracks with the rise in divorce and changing roles in family structures that had been in process since the 1960s, but this is the first American movie I can think of after the pristinely calculated nuclear family model of the 1950s to show an honest, healthy relationship between a father and his young son. The ice cream scene may be famous but it’s the stuff after that that truly stands out -the scenes of Ted and Billy reading together, of Ted walking Billy to school, sharing anecdotes about his son at work, and of course the whole episode with the accident at the park -also brought up in the trial as supposed evidence of Ted’s bad parenting- whereafter Ted rushes Billy through traffic to the hospital and insists on staying with him as he gets his stitches. This was the kind of thing that fathers in movies just didn’t do, and Hoffman takes the responsibility of his performance in this regard very seriously -going so far as to say working on this movie made him a better father. Justin Henry is good too, although it’s not so astounding a child performance that I think warranted him becoming the youngest ever Oscar nominee in any category -nominated at age eight for Best Supporting Actor.
Kramer vs. Kramer is a good reflection of its time –a movie that was entertaining new conversations in tandem with new social realities, and doing so in a grounded manner. As a big Oscar winner it may look perplexingly mundane next to the movies it was nominated against –most of which have held up better, and the following year’s winner which also dealt with domestic themes, Ordinary People is far superior; but it’s also understandable why it found the success it did in the American cultural climate of 1979. Better movies have since pursued its themes more successfully though, and while it may arguably be a landmark it is by no means essential.
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