Grownups, A Child, Divorce, And Tears

By Frank Rich

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.

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.

To capture the nuances of Ted's constantly shifting moods, Hoffman gives a performance of nearly infinite shading. Angry and bitter at the outset, his face pasty with panic, he gradually interjects notes of tenderness and compassion into his role. Ted's new values develop so delicately as to be almost invisible until a scene in which g he reassures his son that the child is not to blame for his mother's departure. Sitting at Billy's bedside, Ted explains that "Mommy left because I made her try to be a certain kind of wife. I realized she tried for so long to make me happy, and when she couldn't and tried to talk to me, I was too wrapped up to listen." If Hoffman were still the glib hustler of the early part of the film, this self-recriminating speech would be a jolt--a screenwriter's ruse. But Hoffman's performance has so carefully delineated the alterations in Ted that his generous confession of past sins seems completely natural.

Justin Henry is no less effective.

Though as angelic in appearance as any child model in a TV commercial, he has none of the self-consciousness that often defeats kids onscreen. When he fights with his father over the dinner table or cries for his mommy in the night, the emotions are not italicized but spontaneous: Benton had the sense to let his young star improvise rather than rehearse to the point of slickness. Henry's character also grows--as he must during the course of Kramer. When Billy and a dejected Ted prepare a French-toast breakfast together near the end of the movie, the son tries to cheer up the father with the same forced smiles and reassuring gestures that Ted used on Henry in a parallel scene much earlier on. It is a masterly way of letting the audience know indirectly that Ted and Billy, once near strangers to each other, have formed one of life's most durable bonds.

That is why, when Joanna finally reappears, it is hard to accept her. The woman who earned affection when she courageously walked out of her imprisoning marriage is now a villain: she wants to take Billy away from the father who sacrificed his work and restructured his life for his son. But again, Benton challenges the audience rather than let it leap to a pat moral position. As Joanna undergoes cross-examination at the custody trial, her virtues ever so slowly reappear. Because she has now regained her selfesteem, she seems better able than before to be a good mother to her child. The sudden pull of Streep's performance confuses loyalties even further. As Joanna gives her own account of her marriage and her efforts to recover from it, Streep painfully sheds layer after layer of the character's past. In a few minutes, she creates an entire life onscreen: the loving bride, the defeated, self-loathing wife and, at last, an independent woman. It is a devastating film-within-a-film--one that rocks not only the audience but also the ex-husband, who watches in the courtroom.

Perhaps some moviegoers will side with either Ted or Joanna after the trial, but most probably will not. Many are likely to identify most readily with the film's principal supporting character, Margaret, a divorced neighbor, played superbly by Jane Alexander. Margaret begins by encouraging Joanna's decision to walk out, later becomes a confidante of Ted's and ends up emotionally drained, torn by both on the witness stand. After the judge has delivered his verdict, it is still difficult for the audience, as well as Joanna, Ted and Margaret, to decide who has really won. The ambiguity lingers to the final frame of the film. Like the first shot, the last one is a close-up of Streep--only now she seems even more distressed than before. Her face dissolves from one contradictory emotion to another in such disturbing succession that she reopens all the wounds and conflicts of the drama. The moment is powerful enough to nearly obliterate the film's resolution, one which some will find all too pat.

Benton gives Kramer vs. Kramer its lifelike quality by clearing away the artifice that most American film makers use to shape human experience into so-called entertainment. His screenplay strips away unnecessary detail and background from Gorman's novel; his direction concentrates on the characters' feelings above all else. Music is never used to heighten a scene, and the camera moves only when the actors' wanderings force it to do so. Benton's focus is so tight that Kramer shows a far more domestic and grittier view of Manhattan than the Allen and Mazursky films. The cinematographer is Nestor Almendros, a frequent collaborator of Franc,ois Truffaut's and Eric Rohmer's and a brilliant portraitist.

Truffaut was the director whom Producer Stanley Jaffe first hired for Kramer. When scheduling conflicts developed, Jaffe turned to Benton. Though he has directed only two previous movies, Bad Company (an antic western with Jeff Bridges) and The Late Show (an eccentric detective story with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin), Benton's career stretches back over a decade. With his longtime writing partner, David Newman, he co-authored the most influential film script of the '60s, Bonnie and Clyde, which, like Kramer, leavened conflict with smart wit. He and Newman also collaborated on such diverse '70s movies as What's Up Doc?and Superman. Benton's crisp pictorial style, which has become more pronounced with each film, can be traced to his years as art director for the graphically innovative Esquire magazine of the early '60s. His preference for characters over plot--something of a flaw in The Late Show--comes from Truffaut, a friend and mentor since Bonnie and Clyde. In Kramer, Benton pays tribute to the French director by using snatches of the Vivaldi mandolin concerto; the same music turned up in The Wild Child, Truffaut's masterpiece about another relationship between a man and a young boy.

Benton makes no extravagant claims for his new film. Says he: "The picture isn't meant to be a film about the in justices of the legal system or about whether fathers or mothers are better qualified to raise kids. The film is, above all, a love story and a story about marriage.

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

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