Word: joanna
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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...
...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...
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...
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...
...nothing stagy about Streep's performance in Kramer vs. Kramer. Emotions play across her face as subtly as breezes ruffling a pond; rarely have the varieties of anguish and uncertainty been so thoroughly catalogued through look and gesture. Streep's understated suffering rescues the character of Joanna Kramer from a virtually no-win plot: bad enough that a mother should leave her young child and then disappear from the film for nearly an hour; worse still that she come back and try to break up the new life that her husband and son have painfully built. "If Joanna...