Word: childe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...