Word: sons
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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...
...that point, Ted Kramer would seem to be an irredeemable monster, but Kramer will not allow the audience any rushes to judgment. No sooner has Joanna left than Benton starts to direct sympathy to Ted, who must now go about the business of raising his son alone. Forced again to choose between the demands of his career and his responsibilities at home, the hero does not make the same mistake twice. At first tentatively, and then wholeheartedly, he throws himself into his relationship with his son Billy (Justin Henry). As he does so, Kramer offers a spectacle that is rare...
...Henry that form the entire middle stretch of the movie and well illustrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that "action is character." Together these two actors-one a movie star, the other a little boy with no previous acting experience-create what is probably the most credible father-son relationship ever seen in an American film. As Ted and Billy slowly come to terms with each other, there is none of the cuteness or sentimentality that so often clots movies about parents and children...
...performance of nearly infinite shading. Angry and bitter at the outset, his face pasty with panic, he gradually interjects notes of tenderness and compassion into his role. Ted's new values develop so delicately as to be almost invisible until a scene in which g he reassures his son that the child is not to blame for his mother's departure. Sitting at Billy's bedside, Ted explains that "Mommy left because I made her try to be a certain kind of wife. I realized she tried for so long to make me happy, and when...
...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, the son tries to cheer up the father with the same forced smiles and reassuring gestures that Ted used on Henry in a parallel scene much earlier on. It is a masterly way of letting the audience know indirectly that Ted and Billy, once near strangers to each other, have formed...