kramer vs kramer

TOPICTed Kramer is a career man for whom his work comes before his family. His wife Joanna cannot take this anymore, so she decides to leave him. Ted is now faced with the tasks of housekeeping and taking care of himself and their young son Billy. When he has learned to adjust his life to these new responsibilities, Joanna resurfaces and wants Billy back. Ted however refuses to give him up, so they go to court to fight for the custody of their son.PLOTKramer vs. Kramer is a 1979 film adapted by Robert Benton from the novel by Avery Corman, and directed by Benton. The film tells the story of a divorce and its impact on everyone involved, including the couple's young son. It received the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1980.In Kramer vs. Kramer, Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep), a Smith College graduate, is a stay-at-home mother for her son Billy (Justin Henry). Feeling confined in this role, and neglected by her husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman), Joanna leaves the marriage in order "to find herself."Ted (who has been focusing on rising in his advertising company in order to provide well for his family) is shocked by Joanna's decision and is left to raise Billy by himself. With the help of his neighbor and Joanna's friend, Margaret (Jane Alexander), Ted comes to understand why Joanna left. In the process, he becomes more invested in raising Billy than in his job (which he eventually loses).About a year and a half after leaving, Joanna returns to New York in order to claim Billy and a custody battle ensues.Kramer vs. Kramer reflected a cultural shift which occurred during the 1970s and the period of second wave feminism, when ideas about "motherhood" and "fatherhood" were changing. The film was widely praised for the way in which it gave equal weight and importance to both Joanna and Ted's points of view .BACKGROUNDWomen’s liberation movement is an important background of this movie. After The Second Sex was published in 1949, the concept of women’s liberation was born and women began to struggle for general freedom. In America, a period of female rebellion began in the 1960s. This rebellion was the largest and most widely publicized social movement of women in history. It affected women of all races and classes around the world. In this movie, Joanna, who was not satisfied with her isolated life style, chose leaving to find her own identity and become a whole person. Actually, women’s liberation is one important theme of this movie.THEMEThere are many themes covered in this movie, such as women’s liberation and children’s situation in divorced families. But what the most important is father’s love.In the latter part of this movie, when Ted and Joanna were fighting for Billy’s custody on the court, their neighbor, Margaret, was called in to give her testimony, and some of her lines are quite impressive. She said: “Joanna, things are not the same now. Ted is not the same man.You don’t know how hard he is trying. They’re beautiful together. If you could see them together, Joanna, then maybe you wouldn’t be here now. ” From Margaret’s words, we can easily tell that she was on T ed’s side, which meant she considered Ted as a good father. However, had Ted always been a good father? The answer is negative. Actually, before Joanna’s leaving, Ted was completely self-engrossed workaholic. He neglected his family, he was an inconsiderate husband, and he was an incompetent father. Fortunately, Ted was able of changing and growing, and the wife’s leaving acted as a catalyst. Growing is always painful, and T ed was no exception—he tried hard to learn to take care of Billy; he tried hard to strike a balance between work and Billy, however, he lost his job anyway. But his efforts were rewarded, because he had grown into a loving and caring father which was a symbol of maturity. Actually, the theme of father’s love was better conveyed with the help of Ted’s Growing process since the contrast makes the father’s love more moving, heart-warming and cherished. Therefore, in order to have a better understanding of the theme “father’s love”, we are going to study Ted’s growing process more closely. First, I want to show you several groups of interesting contrast. The day after Joanna’s leaving, Ted and Billy had breakfast together. And it was totally a mess. Ted hadn’t taken in the fact that Joanna had left, and he did not know what he was doing. When he screwed it, he couldn’t hold his anger anymore; his emotion erupted as he shouted: “Damn it! Damn her! ” and I guess Billy must have been totally confused and scared. Whi le in the end of this movie, when Billy was leaving, they had another breakfast together, but this one was completely different. Although most of the time, they were both silent, they cooperated with each other and everything was in order; they looked at each other and smiled; they hugged each other, both the father and the son with tears in their eyes. All these acts were filled with the love that had been growing between them, and we can actually feel how deep it was. Another contrast is about sending Bil ly to school. The day after Joanna’s leaving, Ted had to send Billy to school. Apparently, Ted had never done this before; maybe this was the first time for him to show any care about Billy’s school life. When he asked Billy: “what grade are you in? ” we c an tell how self-engrossed Ted had been; he even did not know his son’s grade. While in the middle of the movie, after Ted and Billy had lived together by themselves for some time, there was another scene of Ted sending Billy to school. This time, there was no anxiety or hurry—Ted tried to communicate with the boy by listening to his story; he tried to show care by helping Billy with his shoe lace; Billy kissed him goodbye. By then, Ted was no longer that self-engrossed Ted; he had grown into a father who loved his son, who expressed his love to his son and who also needed his son’s love. Another contrast was the conversation between Ted and his boss. At the very beginning of this movie, when Ted talked to his boss, the topic was about clothes, or some anecdotes of other colleagues. This was the typical office talking which showed T ed was a typical working man—he was good at getting along with co-workers, but he seldom showed care to his family. However, over the lunch during which he was fired, Ted kept talking about Billy to his boss. Although Ted himself might not have realized it, Billy had become the priority in his life and his love for Billy had grown very deep. Actually, having breakfast, sending Billy to school, and having conversation with the boss, these three things hadn’t change; it was T ed who was changing—from a workaholic who only cared about himself to a father with great love for his son. Besides these obvious contrasts, some other little things Ted did for Billy also shows that Ted’s love for Billy was no less than his mother’s, and he could take care of Billy as well as his mother. All the things said above helped Ted become a better Daddy, a better person;however, they did have influence on his job. How could Ted balance work and Billy? Actually, there was no balance—one part had to give in, and Ted was aware of this, and he had his own answer—after all these days of living with Billy and trying to be a good father, Ted found the love between father and son which he had lost long ago, and he also found that this love was extremely important to him since it could make his life happier and more fulfilled. Therefore, Ted chose to make some sacrifice over his job. The best scene in this movie to illustrate this point is the scene when Ted showed Billy his new office. He didn’t care the salary was less, at that moment, all he cared was Billy, all he knew was that he loved Billy, and all he wanted was to enjoy life with Billy. Work was an important part in T ed’s life, but Billy was even more importa nt; he would try to balance them, but if necessary, he would choose to sacrifice his work a little, and this sacrifice would be worth it, since his love for Billy was incomparable.REVIEWKramer vs. Kramer review by Roger Ebert"Kramer vs. Kramer" wouldn't be half as good as it is -- half as intriguing and absorbing -- if the movie had taken sides. The movie's about a situation rich in opportunities for choosing up sides: a divorce and a fight for the custody of a child But what matters in a story like this (in the movies and in real life, too) isn't who's right or wrong, but if the people involved are able to behave according to their own better nature. Isn't it so often the case that we're selfish and meanspirited in just those tricky human situations that require our limited stores of saintliness?"Kramer vs. Kramer" is about just such a situation. It begins with a marriage filled with a lot of unhappiness, ego and selfishness, and ends with two single people who have both learned important things about the ways they want to behave. There is a child caught in the middle -- their first-grader, Billy -- but this isn't a movie about the plight of the kid but about the plight of the parents.Hollywood has traditionally approached stories like this from the child's point of view, showing him unhappy and neglected by the grownups -- but what if the grownups aren't really grown up? What about a family in which everybody is still basically a kid crying for attention and searching for identity?That's the case here. The movie stars Dustin Hoffman as a workaholic advertising executive whose thoughts are almost entirely centered around his new account -- so much so that when he comes home and his wife announces she's walking out on their marriage, he hardly hears her and doesn't really take her seriously. But his wife (Meryl Streep) is walking out. She needs time to find herself, she says; to discover the unrealized person she left behind when she went into the marriage.Right away we're close to choosing sides and laying blame: How can she walk out on her home and child? we ask. But we can't quite ask that question in all sincerity, because what we've already seen of Hoffman makes it fairly clear why she might have decided to walk out. She may be leaving the family but he's hardly been a part of it. Harassed, running late, taking his son to school on the first day after his wife has left, he asks him: "What grade are you in?" It's the first. Hoffman didn't know.The movie leaves Streep offscreen during its middle passages, as Hoffman and the kid get to know each other, and as Hoffman's duties as a parent eventually lead to his firing at the ad agency. These scenes are the movie's most heart-warming. The movie's writer and director,Robert Benton, has provided his characters with dialog that has the ring of absolute everyday accuracy, but in the case of the kid (the young actor is named Justin Henry), he and Hoffman reportedly decided to use improvisation where possible.Situations are set up and then the young boy is more or less left free to respond in his own words, with Hoffman leading and improvising as well, and many moments have the sense of unrehearsed real life.What that means is that we can see the father and son learning about each other and growing closer. Another movie might have hedged its bets, but "Kramer vs. Kramer" exists very close to that edge where real people are making real decisions. And that's true, too, when the movie reaches its crisis point: when the Streep character returns and announces that now she feels ready to regain custody of her son.By now we have no inclination at all to choose sides. Our sympathies do tend to be with the father -- we've seen him change and grow -- but now we are basically just acting as witnesses to the drama. The movie has encouraged us to realize that these people are deep enough and complex enough, as all people are, that we can't assign moral labels to them."Kramer vs. Kramer" is a movie of good performances, and it had to be, because the performances can't rest on conventional melodrama. Dustin Hoffman's acting is about the best in his career, I think, and this movie should win him an Academy Award nomination and perhaps the Oscar. His performance as Ratso in "Midnight Cowboy" (1970) might strike some people as better than this one, but he had the advantage there of playing a colorful and eccentric character. This time he's just a guy in a three-piece suit, trying to figure out the next 24 hours. One of his best scenes comes as he applies for a job during an ad agency's office Christmas party, and insists on an immediate decision.Meryl Streep has certainly been having quite a year, and has appeared in what seems like half the year's best female roles (so far she's been in "The Deer Hunter," "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" and "Manhattan," and "Holocaust" on TV). In "Kramer vs. Kramer," Benton asked her to state her character's own case in the big scene where she argues for her child from the witness stand. She is persuasive, but then so is Jane Alexander, who plays her best friend, and whose character is a bystander and witness as Hoffman slowly learns how to be a father.This is an important movie for Robert Benton, who co-wrote "Bonnie and Clyde" and also wrote and directed "Bad Company" and "The Late Show." He spends a great deal of attention on the nuances of dialog: His characters aren't just talking to each other, they're revealing things about themselves and can sometimes be seen in the act of learning about their own motives. That's what makes "Kramer vs. Kramer" such a touching film: We get the feeling at times that personalities are changing and decisions are being made even as we watch them.。