Kramer vs. Kramer

Being Everything to Someone

Here’s a bit about this week’s episode of Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics.  We choose the films almost at random: one of us will watch (or rewatch) something and text the other guy.  We then record without any previous conversation, recreating the enthusiastic conversations people have in the car on the way home from the theater.   We also take requests, so leave a comment below if there’s a film you’d like us to cover.  We’ve done over 250 and you can find them all here.  Spoilers always abound.

In 1979, Kramer vs. Kramer was everywhere.  The commercial ran constantly on network TV, it played in theaters for months, and was a staple of HBO once everyone subscribed and installed the clunky set-top box on top of their TVs.  And at a time when the Academy Awards meant more to us than they do now, it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Actor—all for a budget of $8 million in a time when post-Jaws blockbusters were grabbing everyone’s attention and money.  

I was ten years old when I first saw it, only three years older than Justin Henry, who plays Billy Kramer, the emotional McGuffin of his divorced parents.  I didn’t know anything about divorce (or even anybody whose parents were divorced) and only saw it because that’s what middle-schoolers in my neighborhood did on Saturdays: go to the movies all day to see whatever was playing, regardless of its subject.  (These viewings were always followed by us entering another cinema in the multiplex and watching the second half of something or hiding in the bathroom and then strolling back into the same theater to watch the movie again. To us, this was like participating in Danny Ocean’s New Year’s Eve heist.)   

No ten-year-old could appreciate the idea that Ted Kramer spent too much time at the office or that Joanna Kramer was lonely and desperate.  Why his boss would take him to lunch and then drop him from the big account didn’t make any sense; we were uninitiated into the tactics adults use to make themselves feel better about delivering bad news.  (Our parents didn’t take us out for lunch before they punished or smacked us.) We didn’t understand why the woman from Ted’s office was sleeping over (or why she was naked), what Ted’s lawyer meant when he said, “You can’t beat a crying mother in court,” or the whole novelty of the plot, which questions the intuitive idea that mothers are naturally better parents.  We hadn’t seen The Graduate, All the President’s Men, or anything else with Dustin Hoffman, but we did recognize his performance that didn’t show any daylight between the actor and his role.  He was Ted Kramer being filmed in his daily life, we knew that he really loved Billy, and we wanted them to stay with each other.  

In other words, we watched the movie with the same emotions as its two leading characters—and when Joanna relinquished custody of Billy in the final moments, we assumed that these kinds of things happened all the time.  We were glad, but it didn’t shock us as much as I imagine it shocked the adults sitting near us in the dark.

What many adults thought about the film is captured by Roger Ebert, who opened his review with, “Kramer vs. Kramer wouldn’t be half as good as it is—half as intriguing and absorbing—if the movie had taken sides.”  My admiration for Roger Ebert’s writing and normalizing film fanaticism is boundless, but in this case, he called it wrong.  The movie absolutely takes sides and is a combination of The Verdict and Rocky: we want the hero to win because it’s morally right and feel a visceral reaction to the threat of his losing.  

This does not mean that Joanna Kramer is a monster.  She thinks she has made a big decision, but she’s still confused and trying her best; Meryl Streep is perfect and her scenes with Dustin Hoffman—her packing, her reaction to his throwing the glass—give us the sense of years of simmering tension and her being unable to say what she thinks.  But ultimately, her reasons for leaving Billy, despite what she whispers to him in the opening scene and declares on the stand in court, are, at best, half-reasons, never fully articulated by her because even she doesn’t understand them.  She left Ted to find herself in California and begin a career designing sportswear, leaving her son for a world of fulfilling work. What she doesn’t appreciate is that the world she wants to enter is impersonal and demands total devotion.  That’s what Dustin Hoffman learns when he’s dropped from the account, but she thinks she can balance two competing families.  

But there is no balance: something has to give, despite our being told every day that our work is as vital as our families and that parents need careers to broaden their experiences and get them out of the narrowness of domestic life. At the turn of the last century, G. K. Chesterton railed against this in What’s Wrong with the World:

When people begin to talk about domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? 

Kramer vs. Kramer is exhibit A in Chesterton’s defense.  Joanna wants to escape what she sees as a life of confinement in order to do Big Important Things that seem bigger than life with Billy.  Chesterton again: “I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”  He would extend the same pity to Mrs. Kramer.

But Chesterton’s ideas don’t apply only to Joanna. The trick of the film is that Ted learns this rule about balance as a result of Joanna trying to break it. She inadvertently teaches him the core of Chesterton’s idea. He takes a job for less money and prestige so that he can keep his relationship with Billy intact and learns that parenthood, like marriage, is a matter of constancy. Books about effective parenting and successful marriages abound (and might be great), but the foundation for both of these is showing up.  Constancy is the secret sauce.  It’s what Ted didn’t have with Joanna but what he does end up having with Billy: 

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what it is that makes somebody a good parent, you know. It has to do with constancy. It has to do with patience. It has to do with listening to him. It has to do with pretending to listen to him when you can’t even listen any more. It has to do with love—like, like, like she was saying. 

The court, the ex-wife, and the audience all agree and, to Benton’s credit, the final scene in which Joanna tells Ted that she’s changed her mind is consistent with her character and a way to cement the point about constancy.  All three major characters will, eventually, be happy.  

But not every viewer.  David Thomson calls Kramer vs. Kramer a “smug Hollywood story” in which “the pettiness and tidiness are oppressive and entirely at odds with the natural violence that is unleashed in divorce.”  No “magical ending” is possible, because “sooner or later in divorce cases, everyone behaves as badly as Shelly Winters and Rod Steiger—and sometimes all the time.”  Like Samuel Johnson, if Thomson’s pistol misfires, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.  And like Roger Ebert, Thompson’s aim, usually true, is off in this case: Kramer vs. Kramer is about parenting first and divorce second.  Without Billy and what Ted and Joanna learn from him, the “vs.” can be stricken from the title.  

You can find the episode here on the New Books Network or use the player below.