Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Director: Robert Benton
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jane Alexander, Justin Henry

* * *

For some reason--perhaps because it won several Academy Awards--Kramer vs. Kramer has been coming up a lot recently in my conversations. Most of the time the reference didn't really make sense to me, but I hadn't seen the film and didn't know that much about the plot of the film. I knew it was about a trial (obviously) and that it was about a custody battle because Sean Penn's character quotes Hoffman's big court speech his own custody batte in I Am Sam, a film that only aspires to be as good as Kramer vs. Kramer. Don't get me wrong: Kramer vs. Kramer probably didn't deserve some of the Oscars it received in 1980 (I'm a little wary of Hoffman winning Best Actor over Peter Sellers for his role in Being There), but the film is very much the kind of movie that would get Oscar nods. It's politically pertinent while remaining a very safe kind of film--it softly critiques the biases of the system, drawing focus away from the general to the specific relationship between Mr. and the former Mrs. Kramer. Compare this to a film that more sharply attacks American politics that was also nominated that year, Apocalypse Now. Compare it to Forrest Gump dominating the 1995 Oscars over the film that has already become a classic and one of the most admired in film history, Pulp Fiction. Gump is safer, and Fiction is simply the one of the (if not the) best American film to come out in the 1990's. As I've implied, Kramer vs. Kramer is a film that you can't help but respect, but a film that doesn't hold up to its hype two and a half decades later like Apocalypse Now.

There is something that occured to my while I watched the film, however, in relation to another film of gender bias and conflict: Oleanna. The tagline of that film ("Whichever side you take, you're wrong.") applies much better to Kramer vs. Kramer.

July 13
apartment TV, mid-afternoon

* * *

D