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
