Word: onscreen
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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...
Usually films contain such transformations only for plot purposes, and they achieve them by fast jumps forward in time. Benton instead undertakes the tough task of putting Ted's changes onscreen, bit by painstaking...
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...
...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: the loving bride, the defeated, self-loathing wife and, at last, an independent woman. It is a devastating film-within-a-film-one that rocks not only the audience but also the ex-husband, who watches in the courtroom...
...illicit weekend acting out the fantasies of romance, something that is absent in their homes. While this plot offers plenty of opportunities for big laughs and emotional ironies, the film rarely mines them. Most of Rich Kids consists of mild scenes that sound better in principle than they play onscreen...