Word: laterization
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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...
...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 won. The ambiguity lingers...
After a while, Benton opened the door and asked if he was ready. Justin shook his head. "Forty grown men sat outside and waited," says Benton, "but then Justin came out a few minutes later and did it- just like that. I was stunned at how much he'd learned without being told...
Director Robert Benton recalls her work that day on the set with amazement: "We must have shot that scene from seven in the morning until six at night, over and over again. First in closeup, then a medium shot, finally a long one. Later in the day, we shot only Dustin reacting to her on the stand. During this last take, all 30 people in the room were facing Dustin. I happened to be watching Meryl, as well. She had the same intensity as she had when she first did the scene...
...moved into the hospital; every day she read him the sports pages, comically imitating the overheated delivery of TV announcers and trying to nourish his spirits until the end. He died in March 1978. Afterward, says Streep, "I was emotionally blitzed." She began work on Joe Tynan four months later: "It was a self ish period, a period of healing for me, of trying to incorporate what had happened into my life. I wanted to find a place where I could carry it forever and still function...