Film review

  • Kramer vs Kramer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Benton (1979)

    It won five Academy Awards:  Best Picture, Director, Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep) and adapted screenplay (for Benton – from a novel by Avery Corman).  It was also the first and worst of a trio of quickly successive family-at-war pictures that dominated the Oscars in their year (followed by Ordinary People (1980) and Terms of Endearment (1983)).  I remember the tagline ‘There are three sides to this love story’.  When I saw the film on its original release, I thought this was a sham:  Joanna Kramer, who walks out on her husband Ted and young son Billy, doesn’t get anything like a fair hearing.  Seeing Kramer vs Kramer again (probably for the third time – certainly for the first time in around twenty years) made me wonder if Robert Benton presented even two points of view.  The picture is patricentric, to put it mildly.

    In the opening scene, Joanna is putting Billy to bed.  Nestor Almendros lights Meryl Streep’s face to give her a Madonna look.  Joanna kisses Billy, tells him she loves him and whispers, ‘Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite’.    Billy completes the routine with ‘See you in the morning light’.  Sally, who knew nothing about the film beforehand, said, ‘That means he won’t’.  True enough, Joanna immediately starts packing a bag – although this is unusually well done.  Screen people walking out of a marriage tend to snatch a piece of luggage and throw a load of clothes randomly into it, too emotionally perturbed to pay attention to what they’re doing.  The way that Joanna packs indicates that her decision is premeditated.  The moment provides all the sense of flustered urgency the convention demands but Meryl Streep communicates this in the trembling care with which she folds her clothes into the bag.

    Cut to Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman), enjoying an after work drink with colleagues in the advertising agency where he’s an executive.  Benton establishes within a couple of lines that Ted cares more about his job than his family – but this is not incisive economy:  it’s crude obviousness.  When Ted returns home, Joanna tells him she’s leaving him and, in the scene’s punchline, Billy too.   Joanna doesn’t suggest that Ted’s workaholic selfishness is the problem:  she says it’s all her fault – that she’s an inadequate mother.  Because, in this first scene between the couple, Streep comes across as highly strung in a way that many will find alienating, because Joanna expresses her reasons for walking out in vague and vaguely self-indulgent language, and because Hoffman’s screen persona is essentially harmless (he can do egocentric but never deeply ill-intentioned), the audience is immediately on Ted’s side.  No sooner have we formed a negative impression about Ted, from his first appearance in the office, than we’re made to change our feelings about him.  If Benton was after disorienting complexity, he failed.  Both the set-up and the presentation of the characters are outrageously tendentious.

    The die is cast and the rest of the film is a gruelling process of calculated heartwarming and tearjerking, as Ted learns to be a loving parent, loses his job and goes desperately looking for (and finding) another one on the afternoon New York City is winding down for  the Christmas holiday.  Billy has a playground accident and Ted rushes him to hospital (Hoffman’s sprint to the church in The Graduate is too strong a memory not to come to mind whenever you see him running.)  Billy has to have a few stitches in a face wound.  The hospital doctor tells Ted there’s no need for him to stay – simply in order for Ted to insist on doing so and for the camera to close up on Dustin Hoffman’s nobly obstinate expression, as if the father was rebelling against mighty institutional forces by electing not to leave his distressed child to the mercy of others in a place that Billy doesn’t know.

    Joanna returns from California.  She wants Billy back and wins him in a custody case.  The immaculate companionship of father and son is about to be destroyed when, in the final scene, Joanna at last does the decent thing and decides to leave them to it.  (It would be slightly more believable if she said again at this point that she didn’t feel she was up to being a good mother – but that would detract from the mechanically conciliatory ending:  Joanna’s decision has to be caused by her willingness to accept that Ted and Billy are-beautiful-together.)   There are some gruesome scenes.  Ted, desperately cheerful, makes Billy’s breakfast incompetently and it ends in predictable, messy failure and loud recrimination.  Late on, in a reprise of the procedure – at what Ted and Billy think will be their last breakfast together – Ted is perfectly competent and not a word is spoken.  (There’s a rather better intermediate bit when the pair relax together one evening but here too the complete silence underlines the point of the scene too heavily.)   Ted’s highly improbable job-hunting seems to belong to a naïve age of filmmaking – or to a less pretentious type of screen product:  it plays like something in a sub-Christmas Carol TV movie of the time.

    When Ted and Joanna meet in a restaurant after her return from California, she tells him she’s learned ‘a lot about myself’; he contemptuously asks, ‘What, exactly?’   Benton doesn’t even provide Joanna with the flow of claptrap that her new-found self-confidence might lead you to expect:  she’s floored by Ted’s question and clams up.   Meryl Streep has an electrifying tension in this scene – and her neuroticism is compelling throughout – but it serves only to suggest that Joanna is spot on about not being a fit parent.   Ted says to his lawyer ahead of the custody battle, ‘I’m not sure about her mental health’.  We’re supposed to see this as a desperate line of attack but the one thing that’s surprising is the tentative implication of the form of words Ted chooses:  his wife is an expressionist study of a head case.  Streep may have found the character so thinly written that she decided to do Joanna in an eyecatching way and Benton let her get on with it.  Perhaps this was admiration (although this was one of her first big screen roles, Streep quickly went on to star in Benton’s next, much less successful film Still of the Night) – or perhaps it reflected his bizarrely (unconsciously?) strong hostility towards Joanna Kramer.   When she meets up again with her husband, we know something Ted doesn’t (yet).  Joanna has, for some time, been back in town.  She stands in a coffee shop across the road from Billy’s school and watches him like a (nervy) hawk.

    Ted is utterly honourable – apart from that mental health wobble, a really good sport.   The couple have matching counsels at the custody hearing:  Ted’s is Howard Duff – tough, canny, basically decent; Joanna’s is Bill Moor – an oily smart-aleck.  But how interested is Ted in how Billy really feels about his mother’s departure?  Justin Henry, who was seven or eight when the film was made, is very accomplished as Billy – and very good at suggesting that when the little boy is whining to Ted there’s a weight of unexpressed distress behind the whine.  Ted is remarkably incurious about this – perhaps unaware of it.   (And Benton ends the film at a point that gets him out of writing the conversation that Joanna is to have with Billy, telling him she’s going to disappear from his life again.)  However much I object to the complacently partisan depiction of the father-son partnership, there’s no denying that Dustin Hoffman is perfectly cast for these routines.  He uses his humour and eccentric physique – he often seems like a large child rather than a small man – so that Ted and Billy can seem more like brothers.  (Justin Henry’s performance is probably thanks largely to Hoffman’s help and their trust in each other.)   In contrast, there’s nothing in either the writing or the interactions between Hoffman and Streep to make us believe that Ted and Joanna were ever in love, or why they would be drawn to each other in the first place.

    The Kramers are remarkably isolated.  There’s no evidence that either Ted or Joanna has a close relative to lend a hand or even take an interest in the court proceedings.  Ted initially accuses the couple’s gallant, lovelorn neighbour Margaret of poisoning Joanna’s mind with feminism but, by the time we next see Ted and Margaret together, they’re best pals – there isn’t a whisper of tension between them.  Is Ted’s accusation meant as a joke?   Margaret has the air of an exhausted hippy:  she suggests sisterhood with Joanna only through their shared quality of neurasthenia.  Although the role is weakly written, the character is one of the most sheerly irritating in my filmgoing experience – partly because Jane Alexander plays the selfless, regretful Margaret with such integrity that she sets your teeth on edge.  It’s no surprise that her husband walked out on Margaret (no surprise either that she’s given her own mini-happy ending, when she informs Ted that she and her husband are thinking of getting back together).

    Apart from the job-hunting sequence, the salaried world has a lot to answer for in Kramer vs Kramer – as if parents could pursue paid employment only for selfish and ignoble reasons.  There seems to be no child care or domestic help available in New York for middle-class working mothers and fathers:  after a very long time, Ted asks Margaret if she might look after Billy but there’s no suggestion of remuneration (and the offer doesn’t seem to be followed up anyway).  Ted quickly learns the error of his work-centred ways – so that his occupation is redefined purely as a means of providing for his son.  When Joanna re-enters the picture, one of her most sneaky maneouvres is to have got a job, as a sportswear designer, that pays better than Ted’s.   A less than appealing aspect of Benton’s approach to this theme is the shrewd choice of jobs for both parents, which are creative (to make the characters ‘interesting’) but lucrative (so they’re morally questionable).  Ted could have been a school teacher or a social worker and worked long, family-denying hours – but his calling would have made it less easy for us to be sure that he was spending too much time doing it.  This particular bit of manipulation may be aimed at the liberals in the audience but it’s hard to see this picture as anything other than dismayingly reactionary.

    21 June 2009

     

  • Carrie (1976)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brian De Palma (1976)

    Brian De Palma’s sensuous, lyrical approach to horror is evident from the start.  A group of high school girls have been playing netball and friendless Carrie White has again distinguished herself as hopeless at the game – as she is at everything else.  The girls go to shower and change; De Palma’s camera – rapt, languorous and voyeuristic – moves over their naked or nearly naked bodies.  The palely wobegone Carrie gets some relief from showering alone until blood from between her legs mingles with the running water and she is terrified by this, her first menstruation.  An horrific change of mood during a refreshing shower naturally recalls what happens in Bates Motel but De Palma’s rhythm is very different from Hitchcock’s.  Besides, the audience of Psycho shares Marion Crane’s paralysed terror whereas we can see that Carrie is not ‘bleeding to death’, even though she fears that she is, screaming and begging the other girls to help her.  What’s more startling here is that Carrie is so vehemently despised by her classmates that, instead of reassuring her, they pelt her with tampons and sanitary towels, before the games mistress Miss Collins arrives to intervene.  When Miss Collins explains to the school principal what’s happened, he expresses surprise at seventeen-year-old Carrie’s ignorance.  It turns out that her mother Catherine, a sexophobic religious maniac, has never told Carrie about menstruation but the viewer may share some of the principal’s puzzlement:  hasn’t Carrie seen evidence of periods – or, at least, heard them being discussed – among her classmates?

    This is just the first improbability of De Palma’s famous horror film that you have to overlook.  (I don’t know if the fault lies with Lawrence D Cohen’s screenplay or in the original Stephen King novel.)  Carrie White is transformed from a withdrawn no-hoper into the school prom queen; Chris Hargensen, the nastiest of the girls in her class (in a stiff competition), has been disciplined by Miss Collins so that she can’t herself attend the prom.  Chris, with her boyfriend Billy, plots revenge on Carrie to ruin her big moment as she basks in the glow of attention and applause at the prom.  Chris’s revenge is shocking but it’s nothing compared to what the telekinetic Carrie then unleashes on the gathering.  But how does Chris know that Carrie will be prom queen – who else does she involve in her plot to rig the vote?  Doesn’t the family of another of Carrie’s classmates, the morally ambiguous Sue Snell, think it odd that Sue’s boyfriend Tommy is taking Carrie to the prom instead, and that Sue doesn’t have a partner for the occasion?  And what happens to Carrie psychologically to enable her suddenly to stand up to her rabid, domineering mother and overrule – verbally rather than telekinetically – Catherine’s forbidding her daughter to attend the prom?

    Carrie’s telekinetic powers are in evidence from very early on so that it’s clear they’ll be used whenever necessary.  De Palma is less interested in suspense or surprise than in realising the dream-into-nightmare highlights of the material.  His approach to these highlights is operatic – not only in the sense that it’s intensely theatrical but also in his elaborating an event or detail after you’ve got its point.  This tends to diffuse – or defuse – the horror in Carrie, not least in the film’s final sequence, when the dead heroine’s hand reaches out to grasp that of Sue Snell, who has brought flowers to Carrie’s grave.  The terrifying embrace is then revealed to be part of Sue’s bad dream and De Palma keeps the camera on the girl and her mother:  Mrs Snell comforts her screaming daughter and the shot is held long enough for De Palma to help the viewer too recover from the shock of the hand thrusting up out of the earth.   (This is one of the few bits I remembered from seeing Carrie on its original release and it was still immediately startling, even though I knew it was coming.)

    The essential theme of the story is a strong one.  A girl, isolated by her peer group because of her perceived difference (and consequent inferiority), uses another difference – an unsuspected and more powerful difference – to wreak havoc not just on those who’ve humiliated her but on the whole community, friend or foe.  But the lack of clarity around who is sympathetic and who is hostile towards Carrie works against clear distinction between just and unjust desserts for the victims of the mayhem that she eventually causes (although there’s the odd exception: the well-meaning Miss Collins suffers a particularly harsh fate).  De Palma’s preoccupation with the visual possibilities of Carrie’s revenge means that he never bothers to explain clearly how she is victimised – whether, in particular, accompanying Tommy to the prom makes her more or even less popular.  (Are all or only some of the prom queen votes that Carrie receives motivated by malice?)    When it comes to working through an image, though, De Palma, with the help of his DoP Mario Tosi, is meticulous.  Bloody details recur from that early menstrual scene in the shower onwards:  Catherine White knows her daughter’s pale pink ball dress will be red in due course; the hand clutching from the grave is bloodstained.  And the delicate score by Pino Donaggio is mostly very effective:  the only bits of music that don’t work so well are the jabbing chords that herald telekinetic action.  These so much echo the shower attack in Psycho that they repeatedly, if momentarily, stop Carrie in its tracks and turn it into an Hitchcock hommage (the name of the school – Bates High School – has a similar effect.)

    De Palma’s operatic tendency extends to Piper Laurie’s highly accomplished performance as the nutty mother.  She is immediately, flamboyantly bizarre.  Both the lighting and set decoration in Catherine’s home reflect her personality:  there’s no ordinariness here for the extraordinary events of the story to emerge or depart from.   (Piper Laurie’s portrait of Catherine comes, however, to what is, in every sense, a perfect climax.  When kitchen knives, launched by Carrie’s telekinesis, penetrate her body, the sex-hating Catherine, on the point of death, succumbs with sounds of orgasmic fulfilment.)   Other senior actors – Betty Buckley (the needy, verging-on-lesbian Miss Collins), Priscilla Pointer (Mrs Snell) and Sydney Lassick (an English teacher, and no less odd here than he had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the previous year) – are overemphatic but this quality adds to the unsettling atmosphere.  The younger actors are all strong.  Sissy Spacek, although in her mid-twenties, had already proved in Badlands (1973) an exceptional ability to convince easily as a teenager and she’s outstanding as Carrie – her Cinderella transformation is lovely.  William Katt, as Tommy, is also very effective in the prom sequences and, in the good boy-bad boy partnership, he’s superbly complemented by John Travolta as Billy.   The latter’s first scene, with Billy and Chris driving in his car and ‘Heatwave’ playing on the radio, provides the film with a large jolt of energy:  Travolta’s mixture of brutality and vulnerability is disorienting and the relationship of his volatile face with the camera is extraordinary.  The vividly transparent Nancy Allen (Chris) and the opaque Amy Irving (Sue) are a well-balanced combination too.

    5 August 2014

Posts navigation