Hollywood on Fatherhood

...The Great Santini, meanwhile, feels humiliated...

...And even if —or especially if—the Oedipal struggle is a historical constant, artists are obliged to embody it in a specific time and place...

...Streep is even more impressive, although she appears only briefly at the beginning, and intermittently throughout the last third of the film...

...For example, the story is set in the early '60s, a little more than halfway between the Korean and Vietnam wars, yet it could be the pre-Civil War era for all the difference history makes here...

...Unable to goad the boy into a quick rematch, he stays out at night in the back yard, compulsively shooting baskets in the rain and dark...

...Kramer should know that—they should recognize that Hollywood, like fatherhood, has to change with the limes...

...In the past two or three years, men and their role as fathers have emerged?following a decade in which women and their roles occupied so much attention—as burning issues for social commentators and novelists...

...and even feminists are belatedly embracing it, with less credibility than political practicality...

...Certainly the characters never do come to life, partly because of the hackneyed script and partly because of the lifeless acting...

...After two hours, we don't even care when the freeze-frame ending leaves it unclear whether or not Steward goes through with the crime...

...On Screen HOLLYWOOD ON FATHERHOOD BY ROBERT ASAHINA At his best my father was never much more than a good weekend tennis player, and he was well past his peak by the time 1 was old enough to stand on the same court with him...

...Ben, looking down from an upstairs window, is baffled and hurt by his father's behavior, until his mother (Blythe Danner) quietly explains...

...Yet the story has a new twist...

...After his forgettable appearances in Straight Time and Agatha, it is a pleasure to see Hoffman back in stride...

...Kramer's adjustment to the life of a single, working parent ranges from the mundane (finding out —from his son—which detergent to buy) to the comic (making a mess in the kitchen), from the humbling (learning to control his impatience with the child) to the humiliating (losing Billy in a nasty custody case, a year-and-a-half after Joanna leaves them...

...The one thing that unintentionally rings true is his rhetorical question about his wife (Louise Fletcher) and children: "Why should 1 kill Miriam, the kids, myself—we're already dead...

...Filmmakers talented enough to bring off an otherwise satisfying feature like Kramer vs...

...This is your father's way of apologizing, she says...

...Possibly because of what he has been told, Steward is more or less convinced he will go through with the crime...

...Yet Christopher Lasch, for one, has suggested that the nuclear family in 20th-century America is a "haven in a heartless world," isolated from, rather than continuous with, the social structure...

...Our contest was hardly the kind of primordial struggle depicted in mythology, psychoanalysis and popular drama, yet I was reminded of it by three new films that present three very different views of fathers...

...Steward is a magazine editor, so he searches for an explanation—and a reason for not killing his own family and then himself—by interviewing two "experts...

...Carlino and Conroy, in other words, simply assume that family difficulties automatically mirror the problems of the larger society...

...This is disappointing because Natural Enemies, by focusing on a man whose feeling of "solitary responsibility for the well-being of his family" convinces him that "the only way to protect them is to kill them," does at least raise the serious question of what constitutes patriarchal duty today...

...Kramer, directed by Robert Benton from Avery Corman's best-selling novel...

...Alongside this trend, another one is emerging—concern for the nuclear family: The Carnegie Commission has studied it, with more verbiage than distinction...

...Natural Enemies, directed by Jeff Kanew from the novel of the same title by Julius Horwitz, is an example of a movie based on a compelling issue that is inadequately dramatized...

...The other (Jose Ferrer) gives as an example of the bad state of the world the lack of knowledge about the Holocaust: "This is 1978, and kids have more important things to worry about—like discos and tennis...

...But he could still put such a wicked spin on his serve that I could barely return it...

...The story purports to explore what brings on such extreme behavior, but, thanks largely to a feeble plot device, it winds up offering only pieties and platitudes...

...The day finally came, however, when my teenage energy was just enough to overcome his mature skill at the game he had taught me...

...All men think of killing their families," Paul Steward (Hal Holbrook) muses at the start of the film, "and some do it...

...A mirror of these times is Kramer vs...

...Because she has been pictured throughout as fickle and feckless, Joanna's decision to let Kramer keep Billy is hardly plausible, and the suspicion is inescapable that the ending was contrived to let the audience off the hook emotionally...

...When Joanna leaves, she abandons not only Ted but their six-year-old son, Billy (Justin Henry...

...Most of Kramer's education as a father is as skillfully conceived as it is acted and directed...

...Moreover, the conflict between the uncomprehending father and his troubled son is made so universal that the characters are more archetypes than people, and the drama is hollow...

...When his wife, Joanna (Meryl Streep), walks out on him, Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) experiences many of the masculine equivalents of the experiences common to countless women's novels and movies during the past 10 years: some anxious moments during that First post-marital sexual encounter, a few problems at work and at social gatherings, a lot of friendly advice from "supportive" friends...

...Without the slightest hint of embarrassment or irony, the script has one (Viveca Lindfors) telling him that "it's pretty obvious that the world is coming to an end—it's the fall of the Roman Empire all over again...

...Running through all of this nonsense is the most predictable indictment of suburban life, television, frozen waffles, junk food, and comic books, as if they were all responsible for the kind of murder/suicide Steward is contemplating...

...Although set in the '70s, the portrait of Kramer as a hustling young go-getter who uses phrases like "bringing home the bacon," neglects his family in favor of his career, and forbids his wife to work, seems a caricature out of a dreary '50s novel about soulless Madison Avenue...

...Then Joanna comes to claim Billy—and has a sudden change of heart: "I came here to take my son home," she tells Kramer, "and 1 realized he already is home...

...Because Kramer wants to spare Billy any further ordeal, he decides not to contest the court decision awarding the boy to his mother...

...neoconservatives are idealizing it, with more fervor than persuasiveness...

...One lapse in the movie, however, involves the account of his life as an advertising agency executive...

...This allows him to indulge in the sort of improbable adventures that condemned men in fiction seem to have for the asking...

...The younger Meechum is quietly but defiantly jubilant...

...On the train ride from Grand Central to his 18-century house in West Redding, Connecticut, he happens to sit next to a beautiful, mysterious stranger (Patricia Elliott), who invites him to make love while the train is stalled in a tunnel...

...This general unreality is particularly disconcerting in a surprisingly tasteless subplot about racial strife in the sleepy Southern town where the Colonel and his family are stationed...

...The pictures of John F. Kennedy and the references to Guantanamo seem like pathetic attempts to turn the film into a period piece, to disguise its familiarity as quaintness...

...Naturally, even though it is the 6:30 commuter train, there are no other passengers around to overhear their conversation, much less to watch what happens...

...I continue to marvel not just at the depth she brings to each new character but also at her range...

...Ben befriends one of the neighborhood blacks, a crippled flower seller named Toomer (Stan Shaw) and defies his father by rushing to defend his friend against a mob of murderous rednecks...

...he regards his son's victory as both a threat to his masculinity and a reminder of his mortality...

...But audiences that are expected to be sophisticated enough to appreciate the changing relationship between fathers and their families do not need a phony uplift...

...But Carlino has perhaps been too faithful, for he has duplicated the book's weakness as well: the failure to provide a connection between the generational conflict and its cultural context...

...About 30 minutes into The Great Santini, Lieutenant Colonel Bull Meechum (Robert Duvall)—the Marine Corps jet pilot whose nickname is the title of both the movie and the semi-autobiographical novel by Pat Conroy on which the film is based—loses to his teen-aged son, Ben (Michael O'Keefe...

...they get stuck in the living room and never venture out into the wider world...

...Instead, Kramer resigns himself—as does the audience—to the loss...

...What is even more offensive is the use of the whole episode, which climaxes in Toomer's violent death, as merely a plot device to hype up an otherwise mundane family drama...

...he can see you watching, and he wants to let you know that he knows he'll have to practice hard to beat you in the future...

...Some with vengeance, some because they have no choice...

...Streep is undoubtedly the most versatile and convincing young performer since Robert DeNiro...

...A more serious mistake is the denouement...

...in a one-on-one game of basketball...

...Her Joanna?self-destructive, confused and wrenched by contradictory impulses beyond her understanding—is the polar opposite of the self-assured Southern lawyer she played in The Seduction of Joe Tynan...

...In some ways, the movie could be called An Unmarried Man...

...Carlino and Conroy do not...

...During his lunch break, he visits a posh brothel in an East Side townhouse and engages the services of five high-class hookers...

...no family member had ever defeated the Colonel in any game—not even checkers...

...It is bad enough that Toomer and especially his mother (Theresa Merritt) are the kind of grinnin' and shufflin' darkies who haven't been seen on screen since the days of Uncle Remus...

...By remaining faithful to Conroy's sentiment—and sentimentality—Lewis John Carlino, who directed and wrote the screenplay, has created many such true moments...