Word: kramer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kramer vs. Kramer is a rare movie that finds its tone, its focus and its poetry in its very first image. The image: a close-up of an anguished woman, her face surrounded by darkness. The shot is so intimate that the audience at first yearns for some relief. But the relief never really comes. Kramer vs. Kramer is composed almost entirely of actors' faces, of intense passions and of winter light...
...moviegoers will discover when the film opens in December, Kramer vs. Kramer is the emotional bender of the year...
...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...
What makes Kramer stand out, even in this often heady company, is its lack of cant or trendy attitudes of any stripe. Rather than tailor his characters to represent the various party lines of present-day sexual politics, Benton allows the issues to develop freely and inferentially from the unruly passions of his story. Kramer avoids explicit feminist debates, and it does not provide heroes or villains of either sex. By such omissions, it departs dramatically from films like An Unmarried Woman and Alice, which feature warm, wholly sympathetic heroines and men who are usually either bastards or saints. Kramer...
...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...