Welcome to another entry in our Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
Still chippin' away at the 1970s and a film against which I've long had a bit of a grudge simply because it beat out the timeless masterpiece that is Apocalypse Now in the Best Picture category that year. I'm talking about Kramer vs. Kramer, written and directed by Robert Benton (based on Avery Corman's novel) and starring Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and in a performance that made him the youngest Oscar nominee of all time at age eight, Justin Henry.
Kramer vs. Kramer is a domestic drama about a couple going through a divorce and the effect this change has on their young son. Ted Kramer is a work-obsessed NYC marketing exec, so detached from his home life he doesn't even know what grade his son Billy is in, and so emotionally distant from his wife Joanna that she decides one day to pack up and leave them. Ted is so wrapped up in his own stuff he at first thinks she's joking and then barely reacts once she actually exits. The next morning he haphazardly makes Billy breakfast and just barely gets him to school on time, and we really get a sense of how ill-equipped he is at parenting. But over the next year he and Billy become very close, and with a little help from the Kramers' neighbor Margaret, Ted develops the skills he needs as a father (illustrated perfectly by a later scene where Ted is making Billy the same breakfast, calmly and adeptly). Suddenly though, Joanna returns after a year in Los Angeles and asks for custody, and an ugly legal battle ensues.
There are so many traps this film could have fallen into had it been made by a lesser filmmaker working with lesser actors, but the script, direction and performances are so strong they elevate what might've been a dimestore melodrama into a genuinely touching story involving three-dimensional people.
Hoffman's performance is fantastic here; Ted is a fully realized character going through the hardest time in his life but actually learning and growing as a male role model for his son. Ted shows remarkable self-awareness early on, when Billy asks why his mother left them. Instead of trying to turn Billy against her, Ted explains that he himself wasn't an attentive husband and she left because she wasn't getting the emotional support she needed.
Side note: There have been troubling on-set stories of Hoffman being so committed to method acting that he treated Streep poorly in order to coax a more desperate performance out of her. If accurate, this was of course unconscionable and obviously unnecessary given it's Meryl Streep, the Meryl Streep of actors. Great art arrived at through dubious means is always upsetting to learn about, though certainly not uncommon.
Streep has perhaps the toughest job in the movie - we initially have very little sympathy for Joanna given she's deserted her child, even in spite of how clearly unfulfilled her marriage to Ted has left her. When she suddenly moves back and expects custody we initially side with Ted, who's been not only holding down the fort but eventually excelling as a loving father. And yet because of how the character is written and Streep's tender, sad performance we feel for Joanna a great deal and loathe the line of questioning Ted's attorney subjects her to (Joanna's lawyer is pretty much of a parasite as well, we soon learn). This script truly cares about both of these adult characters and makes them quite sympathetic in spite of their irreconcilable differences.
But the surprise casting coup here is Justin Henry as Billy. A film like this could still work even with a poor performance from the child actor, but Henry is prodigious here, delivering a very natural turn with loads of pathos. We've all seen plenty of films where the child character is an unrelenting nuisance and we pity the hell out of their parents, but this film makes Billy into a real kid with real emotions, one Ted falls in love with. There's a tearful third-act scene between them that's as emotionally wrenching and real as any I've witnessed between parent and child characters. Henry's Oscar nod was well-deserved.
I went into this thinking it would mostly be about the custody battle (Even the title suggests that), but it's much more about two flawed adults who couldn't work as husband and wife but deeply want to work as exes, and their ever-changing relationship to their son, who loves them both but just wants to stick with the safe routine he knows. I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy this film as much as I did. It's not Apocalypse Now, but I'll be damned if it isn't a worthy Best Pic winner.
I give Kramer vs. Kramer **** out of ****.
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