MALE SOAP OPERA
Mills, Nicolaus
Long after it should be dead at the box office, Kramer vs. Kramer is still thriving. It is not hard to figure out why. Kramer vs. Kramer is a film with a subject to wrench the heart—a failed New...
...while the homebody is Ted Kramer, who changes from an ambitious Madison Avenue executive into a nurturing parent, one who would rather spend time with his son than court a new account...
...Kramer its tone, sentimentality, not comedy, is the ultimate coin of the realm, and for this reason what is so "entertaining" and trivializing in a picture as successful as Kramer vs...
...Without Joanna, Ted changes from an ambitious careerist to a caring father, and without Ted, Joanna changes from a frustrated housewife to an independent woman with a career...
...When Ted thinks of the future, he asks Margaret if she would take care of Billy in case he died, and without a moment's hesitation she says yes (to those who have mastered separation, one more child is clearly a minor burden...
...Kramer offers, and it keeps us from the kinds of questions we want to ask later on when we see Ted take a lesser paying job for the sake of 459 his son, give up his weekend time, and limit his circle of friends...
...It features two superb actors, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, as Ted and Joanna Kramer, plus an affecting child, Justin Henry, as their son Billy...
...Kramer is that, while liberation is here to stay, what we better get used to is that the newly liberated woman is going to do what the old chauvinistic man did...
...Kramer he relies on this vision to make his audience identify with Ted and Joanna Kramer...
...Kramer being marketed as a comedy, such a reductive view of middle-class life would, of course, make sense...
...Ted's attacks on "sisterhood" are seen as a substitute for his failure to be concerned with his wife's inner life, and in one of the most confessional scenes in the film, Ted tells Billy that his mother tried to fill the role she was expected to occupy and finally became so unhappy that she had to run away...
...How else to milk laughs from single parenthood, women's liberation, the broken family...
...Either the camera shifts back and forth, focusing on whoever is talking, or it is positioned behind the head of whoever is listening...
...We don't know what happens to Billy between the end of school and when Ted gets home from work...
...The film has a happy ending precisely because neither Kramer wants reconciliation, and we see that in the world the Kramers inhabit decency, tenderness, consideration are all possible provided they are not burdened by the kind of relationships in which complexity and day-to-day sharing are integral demands...
...The same is true of Ted's divorced neighbor, Margaret (Jane Alexander), who, despite her own children, always is free to give advice and spend time in the Park...
...She is going to abandon her family when it interferes with her selfhood...
...Kramer, and it is the basis for the comedy that dominates the first half of the film...
...The significance—one might also say the cynicism—of Benton's perspective becomes clear when we look at the social assumptions that structure Kramer vs...
...What is missing in this picture of the happy postmarital family is, of course, the obvious: Billy's perspective on divorce...
...Kramer revolves around Ted's domestic gaffs and insensitivity to Billy, it never goes deeply enough to undermine the happiness that follows when Ted and Billy adjust to each other...
...We even learn that he believes his misbehavior has driven his mother away...
...The Ted Kramer we see at the end of Benton's film is, to be sure, a man we believe could cope with all these familial details...
...By what it simplifies and softens, it is prescriptive as well...
...At the start Kramer vs...
...In the world of the 1980s the liberated woman is here to roam, and only her sense of restraint will stop her from getting her way...
...From time to time we see him sulk and cry...
...We don't even know how Ted, who shops before going to the office, keeps his groceries from spoiling...
...But the fact that he is never required to do so in convincing depth is revealing...
...We don't, except for one brief scene, know how Ted handles dating...
...Yet the hard evidence in Kramer vs...
...Kramer progresses we see that, for the adults in the film, separateness is far preferable to closeness...
...Kramer pays verbal homage to the idea of women's liberation...
...Ted's trials as a parent are played (mostly) for cuteness, and only rarely do we get a serious internal sense of what it means for him to be a single father...
...460...
...It is always the adult's perspective that prevails and the child's point of view that gets set aside...
...Indeed, by mid-film the two of them are a senior junior version of Neil Simon's "odd couple...
...and under writer-director Robert Benton's control, the film moves at a vignette pace that never bores...
...The Ted Kramer we first see trying to shop, cook, and console his son is a figure straight from the funny pages, and his domestic failures illustrate how alienating his career ambitions have been...
...The court agrees and awards Joanna custody of Billy...
...Kramer relies on to give it appeal rests on the assumption that we have reached a point where the diminished public expectations of the last decade now have their equivalent in diminished private expectations...
...Kramer is soap opera brought to the screen...
...Kramer as an updated Stella Dallas or a sophisticated version of the soaps that now dominate afternoon television is to ignore what is most important about it: its appeal to a vast middle-class audience...
...She is going to expect someone else to pick up the pieces she leaves behind...
...By the film's end the postmarital family emerges not only as a viable alternative but as an alternative that carries with it an added bonus: it promises a setting in which conflict can be limited to those resolvable battles that any parent has with a growing child...
...For the view of urban middle-class life that Kramer vs...
...Men can be housewives, too...
...But in the soap opera world that gives Kramer vs...
...Kramer is Joanna Kramer, who in order to "find herself' leayes her young son, her husband, and her Upper East Side apartment...
...Kramer develops and Ted settles into the role of single parent, he becomes admirable...
...He becomes softer, less worried about money, more concerned with what it means to be a nurturing parent...
...What we never see in Kramer vs...
...Kramer makes all this success hard to take...
...But Kramer vs...
...Kramer in which two people appear, only one is on screen at a time...
...By contrast, as Kramer vs...
...When after an absence of more than a year Joanna Kramer returns to New York with ajob that pays more than her husband's she assumes, without a feeling of guilt, that she has a right to claim custody of her son...
...This is in many ways the most positive notion in Kramer vs...
...The only difference is that the movie has reversed the standard soap opera formula in which the man leaves home for the sake of adventure, the woman sacrifices herself to preserve the family, and the man, finally realizing what he has done, forfeits all claims to domestic peace...
...For at bottom what it shows is that Kramer vs...
...q For the idea of male soap opera, I am indebted to Professor William Park of Sarah Lawrence College, who let me borrow from a talk he gave on Kramer vs...
...In almost every scene in Kramer vs...
...Kramer is that the emotional costs of divorce can also be prohibitively expensive...
...What was initially a trauma for the Kramers—separation—thus turns out to be a stepping stone to the most desirable state of all— separateness...
...The postmarital family works...
...For it exemplifies the view of single father as parent that Kramer vs...
...Moreover, Ted accomplishes his transformation in a distinctly masculine way...
...She is going to try out new sexual partners for as long as it pleases her...
...They thrive on silent breakfasts, on not bugging each other about little things (neither flushes the toilet in the morning), and when they want to, they can even cook together...
...Kramer is ominous for what it says about the 1980s...
...Kramer is a film with a subject to wrench the heart—a failed New York marriage and a painful child-custody suit...
...Were Kramer vs...
...While the first half of Kramer vs...
...Separateness is best...
...Director Robert Benton may not have the eye of an Ann Beattie or a Joan Didion, but he has a vision of America in the 1980s that is far more accessible than theirs, and in Kramer vs...
...Kramer never lets Billy's perspective control matters...
...Such camera work would seem to suggest an ironic perspective on the distances between people...
...A second viewing of Kramer vs...
...Yet, to dismiss Kramer vs...
...Only Joanna's eleventh-hour decision not to take Billy from Ted stops this tragedy from happening, but the lesson remains unchanged...
...The adventurer in Kramer vs...
...Kramer goes, reduce Ted's effectiveness as a parent...
...It is his emotional attentiveness that makes his son happy, and the fact that the two of them have chocolate doughnuts for breakfast or TV dinners at night does not, as far as Kramer vs...
...What is more, it is not just Ted and Billy who thrive as a postmarital family...
...Kramer is not just descriptive of middle-class life in urban America...
...But as Kramer vs...
...The difficulty with this ultimately rosy picture of "masculine motherhood" is, unfortunately, all that it leaves out...
...By virtue of the whopping fee Ted's lawyer charges, we learn how costly a child-custody battle can be...
...The liberated woman is here to roam...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
