Tale of Hoffman: Kramer vs. Kramer
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen TALE OF HOFFMAN KRAMER VS. KRAMER WHEN MY wife and I got married iff the mid-sixties, we used to play touch football on Sunday afternoons with ten other couples. Out of the total of...
...Since I have been left out here, maybe I am disqualified from judging them...
...I don't like movies that attack my emotions precisely where they know I'm defenseless...
...Elsewhere, however, Kramer doesn't try to succeed by kinetic art like this...
...The poor guy literally doesn't know what he's saying anymore...
...Yet I do find that there are a few distinctions among them I feel competent to make...
...I think that the success Kramer is enjoying results from its ability to appeal to both men and women at the same time...
...But how could you use Hoffman's approach to play a really big role—Lear, say, or even Count Dracula, about whom I was speaking in the last issue...
...She volunteers to be the lady who gets dunked in the tank of water at a quarter a pitch, and Reynolds gives her about $5.00 worth of dousings to cool her off...
...I've got to find out what you're doing...
...We know the movie will find a way around this obstacle to their relationship...
...Hoffman literally moved into this fellow's office, where he would spend days on end watching how an art director works, speaks, gestures, etc...
...The most histrionic moment to which Hoffman had to rise occurs only a few scenes into his performance when Kramer explodes with rage and confusion at what his wife has done...
...Part of the embroidery Hoffman put on the tirade this crucial scene contains was to stumble purposely over certain lines...
...To work up the role, Hoffman scouted out a real advertising art director he could study at close range...
...It is an outlet for both the self-righteousness that men feel in these situations and the guilt that women feel...
...His performance as Kramer has real virtuosity, but virtuosity achieved within a very, very narrow range...
...The people they're about are the people they're for...
...It turns out that Kramer is not so different from the other movies in this genre after all...
...Kramer...
...The man feels he is the aggrieved party because his wife left him even though he had done nothing "wrong...
...These feelings are entirely natural, but I don't think that we should therefore admire a movie which panders to them...
...That they really want to get back together again goes without saying, which is a good thing since they're not speaking...
...Up to a point both the men and the women crave the pain they are in, which is for each a way to cling a little longer to the wreckage of their marriage—a way to delay sliding down into the icy emotional waters where you are truly on your own and must swim or sink alone...
...The one he got to co-operate had not only lost his job like Ted, but looked like Hoffman himself...
...But I think it's equally important not to give this movie more than its due...
...All these movies are soap operas...
...15 February 1980: 87 Compare it to Starting Over...
...Nobody simply is, except infants...
...Once we get self-conscious, we act—all the way to the grave...
...It puts its mouth where its money is...
...They show us how completely the self-assurance this character exudes has been undone...
...Next came films, like Starting Over, that might have been called An Unmarried Man...
...To be successful, he has to stay pretty close to home...
...In this kind of dramaturgy, we have to presuppose the feelings the characters have in each scene...
...Now we have Kramer, which is The Unmarried Couple...
...He even went to his house when the fellow wasn't home and took his clothes to wear in the movie...
...Kramer turns into this kind of dumb show only once, in a scene where the little boy (Justin Henry) is rushed to a hospital to have stitches taken in his eye...
...Powers of observation as keen as his strike us as all the resources an actor would ever need...
...Kramer may be in other ways, it at least provides the kind of acting that a slice of life requires...
...I mention it just so you'll realize that I am one of the few people I know who is not the right audience for An Unmarried Woman, Rich Kids, Starting Over or Kramer vs...
...The very things that make Kramer affecting—its pertinence and timeliness—are also its limitations...
...First there was An Unmarried Woman...
...Hoffman's statement about getting the character "inside" him so he can "do" the role sounds very authoritative...
...It too is just a session of group therapy, a chance to be reassured that you are not alone with your problems...
...the only question is how...
...In their adaptation of Dan Wakefield's novel, scriptwriter James Brooks and director Alan Pakula have tried to stick to situations that can embody stock emotions...
...A movie that proceeds in this way is pretty low-caliber fun, like a crossword that makes it easy for us by containing a familiar quotation...
...Ted Kramer is a role made to order for an actor who is an obsessive-compulsive like Hoffman...
...Ted Kramer is an advertising art director who loses his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) and then loses his job as well...
...There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Hoffman's philosophy, a lot more...
...So an actor shows you how people act...
...Hoffman's acting is inventive throughout the film...
...In the latter, after Burt Reynolds is thrown out by his wife (Candice Bergen), he joins a therapy group for divorced men...
...In a development that's typical, Burt Reynolds and his ricochet romance (Jill Clayburgh) have had a tiff...
...The solution is provided by a fair to benefit the school where she teaches...
...Because I've so often had to play the divorce counselor to my friends, I have an unwanted expertise in this area...
...A few transposed words here are as carefully executed, and as important to our understanding of the character, as a pratfall by Chaplin...
...Commonweal: 88...
...Although we think of a Method actor as someone whose submission to his own libido makes him inarticulate, Hoffman is pretty good at explaining himself.'' My job is to do you," he says, "and the only way that's possible is if I've got you inside me...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...One reason this intense prep work was necessary was that Hoffman had to have the character he was playing "inside" himself from the very beginning of the film...
...Out of the total of twenty-two people, my wife and I are the only two who are still married to each other...
...Whom would Hoffman go and study to get these characters "inside" him...
...Hoffman observed this man through two-way mirrors...
...It was by coming to Kramer straight from the study of a real art director that Hoffman hoped he could project how such a man reacts to a wife's desertion...
...For instance, I feel safe in saying that however indistinguishable Robert Benton's Kramer vs...
...No parent can watch this scene without being turned inside out by it...
...They are too large to fit in such a small space...
...The same might be said of the whole movie...
...That's when Joanna walks out, leaving Ted alone to cope with their son...
...To do so gives us the illusion of a perspective on our own lives and times which we don't really have...
...All the scene tries to do is be clever in illustrating what we have already guessed...
...A psychiatrist I know considers this the most flabbergasting statistic he's ever heard...
...The woman feels guilty because she left her husband or, worse, her children, in order to "find herself...
...The weekly sessions become the movie's sub-plot, and in the spirit engendered by such groups, the movie itself begins to rely more on acting out than acting...
...It explores impalpable experiences and relies upon Dustin Hoffman's performance to flesh them out...
...One has to give his performance its due, and Meryl Streep's as well, for although her role is much smaller than his, her acting is commensurate where it needs to be...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 3
