Beginning with a visual blur, as several current movies do, the all-female Ocean’s 8 takes a while to take shape, settling into a generic caper movie groove which is ultimately as satisfying as its advertising. Sandra Bullock leads but doesn’t carry the picture.
Part of the problem with this light, occasionally and mildly entertaining heist film is that Ms, Bullock, a skilled actress capable of delivering outstanding performances, is as blank and expressionless as Cher, whose camp status compensates for whatever she lacks. Sandra Bullock (The Lake House, The Blind Side, Miss Congeniality) is a versatile performer, however, in this movie she’s blank.
She plays a thief who is granted early release, seeking to execute an elaborately schemed jewelry theft and exact revenge on the man who snitched. Cate Blanchett, dressed as a West Village type punk rocker inexplicably prone to wearing masks on her head, plays her partner. This is as much character development as the Ocean’s 8 audience gets.
The heist’s hook is a 3D printing-powered conspiracy carried out by a team of women who are lying, cheating, lowdown criminals, so there’s no redemptive characterization. They’re all as fake as reality TV, which is amply represented by a bunch of Kardashian cameos. There are too many to mention but, besides punky Blanchett and Cher-like Bullock, there’s Helena Bonham Carter looking and acting like a dotty version of Madonna, Sarah Paulson as a housewife and a multicultural cast which includes pop singer Rihanna as a computer hacker.
Product placement abounds, with plugs, plants and feathery tickles for Brinks, Cartier and the Met, besides the Kardashian clan. It’s a frothy, occasionally fun, underworld without men. Even Paulson’s character, who has a husband, barely shares screen time with someone of the opposite sex, which eventually appears to be at least part of the point of the innocuously pointless Ocean’s 8. At one point, Paulson’s character is depicted chiding her son that it’s not OK to put gum in his sister’s hair.
That, the lesbianism and the revenge subplot sort of hit the audience over the head with the malelessness of the movie, which comes off at its best with an air of a Devil Wears Prada fashion show, minus the token gay male sidekick.
Women can be inscrutable, smooth, cagey criminals, too, is the thematic upshot, such as there is one, in the bland pickup of the recent Ocean’s 11 movie series. A light, pop/jazz-infused score which includes a strangely electronic overlay of Nancy Sinatra’s one hit wonder and Maurice Jarre’s Lara’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago comprise the brisk, pleasant, toe-tapping musical score by Daniel Pemberton.
The problem with the implausible Ocean’s 8, directed by the talented Gary Ross (The Hunger Games, Pleasantville) is its lack of plot and character development. The audience never gains access to the Sandra Bullock character’s plan or the team’s skill sets in advance. So when one small character says “it’s bloody interesting”, I have to admit I thought it isn’t. Everything plays out without any foreknowledge, so the heist comes together as if by magic.
Co-starring Anne Hathaway as an irritating and vapid celebrity, who at one point chooses to prostitute herself, casting more doubt on the already dubious credibility of Hollywood’s Me, Tooism as a vehicle for female liberation, Ocean’s 8 provides the immediate gratification one gets from playing in a puddle.
Reader’s Digest published Fulton Oursler’s article in its December 1945 edition which, in turn, became the basis for director Elia Kazan’s second of 19 feature-length motion pictures, Boomerang! (1947). An especially relevant and taut film it is, too. Steeped as it is in stark and sobering black and white naturalism, this is considered part of the jaded film noir genre. In its first half, it’s easy to see why. Boomerang! has an almost exclusively dark view of mankind as a petty, raging mob, a theme in Kazan’s movies.
The status quo reeks from every pore of nearly every man and woman in a mid-sized Connecticut city, where a priest is gunned down in public, execution style, in a shocking scene. The men who run the New England city are pestering cronies and second-handers. The women are also bad, depicted as a population of nattering females that add up to a herd of guttersnipes. This is a measured depiction, however, nested into daily outrages and outbursts that any one from every station in life might relate to given a certain context. Water cooler gossip and chatter, so prevalent in today’s mindless media, social and otherwise, spreads like a silent and deadly disease without question in this upper east coast town.
There are exceptions, though, in a few fallible men and one, lone woman. Kazan, working with screenwriter Richard Murphy (who worked with Kazan later on Panic in the Streets), delivers the flawed hero in leading man Dana Andrews. From the beginning, Andrews as the state’s attorney checks and thinks for himself. He’s a man of the people but he is foremost a man of reason. In a key scene, when he’s presented with a dilemma which threatens to destroy his highest value, he gains balance and guidance from principle. Not by merging with the herd, ceding to the mob, or yielding to pure, raw emotion. His inspiration comes from words in a book and it is followed by a scene, really one of her best in pictures, with Jane Wyatt (Jim Anderson’s wife on Father Knows Best) as his wife.
In quiet, intimate scenes between Wyatt and Andrews, Kazan embeds his signature of deep and, to a certain degree, intellectual loving couples — think of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Man on a Tightrope, On the Waterfront, even Wild River — uniting and acting on principle against some form of adversity, usually collectivist injustice. These are not the picture’s dominant scenes or themes. But, with Wyatt’s simple reply to her husband that she “didn’t intend it to”, their brief but indelible unity is early proof that strokes of romanticism move and fuel Kazan’s exceptional filmography.
Can collectives be wrong? This is the underlying question which introduces the Boomerang! theme that the collective must be challenged by the individual who stands alone against everyone and everything. This, of course, is the opposite theme of these collectivist times, which makes Boomerang! more urgent, meaningful and potent. With Lee J. Cobb (12 Angry Men) as a rational policeman, Karl Malden (On the Waterfront) as a detective and Arthur Kennedy (Too Late for Tears) as the accused murderer, Boomerang! dramatizes the highly charged prospect of jumping to the wrong conclusion over the murder of an innocent man. This entails examining injustice against society’s most vulnerable victims, in this case an Army veteran who is easy pickings, police brutality, the incalculable damage of cronyism and the crucial role of the free press.
Boomerang! shows what shapes the factors that cause an entire community to become a lynch mob — today’s mindless Me, Too movement comes to mind — and drives the individualist to doubt, question and “fight the whole town”. Loaded with tightly drawn lines, ideas and performances and laced with clues to beat the men of the status quo, who gang up and intimidate with what amount to loaded questions, Boomerang! nails its gritty noirishness, lampoons populism in its lowest forms and flips up a single, penetrating question: “Is one man’s life worth more than the community?”
Though too much of what backs up the answer happens offscreen, which becomes apparent in the film’s left-field courtroom climax, Boomerang! demonstrates with a sense of purpose and style that getting smacked back with the force of an accepted rotten idea stems from the false premise of the question itself.
Robert Benton’s movie version of Avery Corman’s novel of the same name, Kramer vs. Kramer, begins with husband and wife in mutual conflict and ends with them in resolved conflict and mutual understanding. The woman begins the story in rapid descent, on the verge of suicide, and ends in acceptance of the facts of reality and ascent. The man begins the tale of divorce and child custody dispute in confusion and ends in clarity.
This excellent 1979 film, which measures and dramatizes the impact of ignorance on one’s work, family and life, amounts to an affirmation of loving oneself as the prerequisite to romantic love and proper parenting. Take the title at face value; this depicts a contest between departing spouses. Kramer vs. Kramer fundamentally dramatizes man’s struggle to be his best.
This is why, on the eve of its 40th anniversary, this motion picture continues to find and keep an appreciative audience. With many layers of insight, each carefully kept on a human scale with perfectly framed pictures, timing and acting, thanks to Benton’s crisp and unyielding storytelling and direction, the Columbia Pictures film honestly, quietly and naturally depicts the inner peace of resolving marital conflict.
Kramer vs. Kramer also starts (and, ultimately, finishes) with an expression of a mother’s love. Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep in an early and indelible performance) is clearly, deeply disturbed. But her breadwinner husband, Ted (Dustin Hoffman in a skilled and remarkable mid-career transition), can’t get away from work. As ad man Ted’s being put in charge of ads for a commercial airline, his nearly-mad housewife’s packing a bag with their son Billy’s smudged t-shirt packed inside. By the time Ted Kramer comes home to celebrate the good news of his career advancement, casting off an aside about a man in the accounting department who killed himself, he’s ignorant to his mate’s inner torment and shocked by the fact of her imminent breakdown.
At first, Ted Kramer’s in denial of the end of his marriage, one of the first stages of grief over a death or loss. He confides in his boss, also a man, bemoaning the “sisterhood” of 1970s feminism, which is expressed as a matter of fact, a minor annoyance, something to dismiss, not as hostility toward women. Ted does not yet know the damage that feminism will cause and in what ways. Kramer vs. Kramer is not a politically themed film, though it nevertheless dramatizes feminism’s inherent sexism.
“Godammn her!” Ted yells in the kitchen in front of his young son, Billy Kramer (Justin Henry), in a formative scene. So his grief for the death of his marriage goes from denial to anger. But this Oscar Best Picture winner peels back layers to reveal the depth of Ted Kramer’s character with each new insight. He phones his empty (and wife-abandoned) home as the telephone rings and echoes throughout lifeless rooms. He sits and endures the discrimination of his boss, who prejudges that the single parent is somehow reduced in his ability to produce. He learns, too, that there’s truth in this judgment, as Billy’s preference for playing with flying machines leads to a work-at-home disaster. He bears Billy’s judgment, too, paying the price like most men of the era for not being the dominant parent. Without fanfare, Ted Kramer learns that being the parent means mastering the ability to just be.
At the time it was released, Kramer vs. Kramer made good on the novelty factor. America had mostly emerged, thanks in large part to media figures such as Phil Donahue and the self-esteem movement, from the collectivist counterculture era to an era in which egoism and individualism were under serious consideration.
Audiences were curious about what being a single dad meant in practice. I’m not sure that a movie such as Kramer vs. Kramer or the following year’s exemplary and underrated Best Picture Oscar winner, Ordinary People (also based on a novel), would have been as well received in another era, earlier or later. These were complex dramas with interesting, introspective male leading characters in conflict with interesting, flawed female leading characters with young males at risk of imminent physical and psychological harm.
Kramer vs. Kramer plays and ages well as a serious and pathfinding movie about the male parent; depicting today’s man as a work in progress, neither a wisecracking, supernatural he-man nor an asinine and wisecracking backslapper. Kramer vs. Kramer remains a rare portrayal of the modern man who takes himself and his work, family and life seriously.
You realize this most while watching Ted Kramer read his wife’s letter to Billy. You see in Hoffman’s performance, in his character’s slight vocal tremble, pause and facial paralysis combined with a father’s attempt at composure, the father’s love on display.
The progression of the Kramer family unfolds brilliantly from there, with the newly empowered father boxing up the past — cleaning up the home — and, coping with his son’s heartache from abandonment, accommodating a child’s love for the other parent, covering up the sleeping child and gently closing the door on the past.
Within a few scenes, as son and father bond in a home where they may forget to flush and forge new boundaries over ice cream, the same door stays open when the singularly silhouetted father earns his son’s love in a stirring affirmation of conditional love.
Writer and director Robert Benton renders and achieves this gentle transformation with elegant, purposeful photography by his frequent partner, cinematographer Nestor Almendros (The Blue Lagoon, Places in the Heart) and a dry, distinct sense of humor, courtesy of a nude scene by pre-Poltergeist Jobeth Williams. The arc ends with winking, closing doors and a triumphant bicycle lesson in Central Park with the score’s first use of horns.
If the following scene illustrates an ominous threat to come after the father finally becomes publicly demonstrative in loving his son, Hoffman’s Ted Kramer thrives in adversity, showing strength, determination and magnanimity toward friend and neighbor (Jane Alexander as Margaret in an excellent turn) after Billy’s fascination with flying machines finally lands him at an Upper East Side hospital.
The script’s economy comes through with the line “stay, Daddy.” But perhaps it’s Benton’s ability to shuttle between concise words and divorced life’s deftly isolated moments in action which is most remarkable about Kramer vs. Kramer. The film’s most superbly delivered emotional moment, or certainly one of them, comes with Margaret’s kitchen scene following thedescent of Billy’s toy 747. Alexander’s honest, unaffected performance balances perfectly with Hoffman’s assured act of kindness, deliverance and perfect timing by capping her admission of fallibility with affirmation of her rational parenting and good guardianship. Ted’s and Margaret’s friendship — it is never anything but an abiding, deep friendship — is one of the most liberated, rational and realistic portrayals of friendship on screen.
As Joanna Kramer, who returns to assert custody of her son, Meryl Streep is too cold and pouty and in her performance one sees the future affectations and limitations of Streep’s acting ability. But with Benton’s writing and direction, Joanna’s declaration, “I want my son,” followed by Ted’s violent outburst, flawlessly captures the raging horror and bitterness of the most combustible parts of breaking up. Howard Duff appears as Ted Kramer’s custody attorney, instructing his client to essentially check his premises and account for the positives and negatives of raising a child (Ted writes with a Flair: “Money/work affected/no privacy/no social life/no let up” all in the negatives column).
Still he risks everything to raise his child.
And, with the theme that proper parenting precisely entails putting everything important in life at risk, that’s about what it costs Ted Kramer, who discovers in himself that he’s willing to do it. The risk is worth the reward. In a cluster of scenes which take him from refusing pity to preserve his pride to that unique feeling during a split that there’s a party all around when you’re all alone to the elation of finding your own way, Ted Kramer earns the best reward. It happens simply, quietly, again, with a Saturday morning view of New York City’s Chrysler Building and an airline logo while the boy who plays with airplanes looks out at the world, spins in his father’s office chair and says “Wow!” when he sees where his dad works.
This completes the main thematic arc of Kramer vs. Kramer‘s internal journey. Joanna Kramer has embarked on (and returned from) hers, Ted Kramer has mastered taking his in stride and this leaves the beneficiary of their partnership, Billy Kramer, free to begin to gather the data for his own. As his parents sort through the court contest to decide his custody, he’s at least free to relax and ask questions about life and he does. When the title’s external confrontation comes to pass, the camera shows mother entering the courthouse with her lawyer, rising to show that the father stands alone.
Even in the judiciary, however, Ted Kramer proves himself the better parent, sitting sternly (looking like Fritz Weaver) as he listens and looks upon his ex-wife with empathy as she testifies the basic premise and entire argument for her case: “I’m his mother…I’m his mother.”
Sexism works both ways — irrational discrimination against men as well as against women — and it’s often the individual of the same sex doing the prejudging and discriminating, as Kramer vs. Kramer demonstrates. Man alone, whether in silhouette loving his son, standing in a courthouse or sinking into the furniture in pain and agony, in addition to sorting through his own internal struggle, is an emblem in Kramer vs. Kramer.
In dramatizing Ted Kramer versus Ted Kramer, within the context of Ted Kramer vs. Joanna Kramer, with Vivaldi’s and Henry Purcell’s music adapted by John Kander, Robert Benton captures the downfall, triumph and beauty of today’s unsung, heroic man — the producer who is also the father — who gives the woman the benefit of the doubt and loses graciously, living by example for his son to teach that man must honor the law even when the law is wrong.
The ending of Kramer vs. Kramer ought to be the least surprising. It comes with an exchange between the ones who love the child they made. It’s an exchange that anyone who chose to come together to break apart will instantly recognize and understand, whether for the sake of a girl, a boy, a home, or a possession such as a cat, dog or work of art. This is the gentle and calibrated genius of Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer; that there is that unique sense in which coming apart from another means becoming whole by healing from within and that this is the point of one’s life, whether in love or parenting…because becoming whole to pursue happiness is the purpose of being human.
Yes, Kramer vs. Kramer is driven by its titular sense of conflict. But every word and picture about this intelligent movie is implanted with the truth that conflict can be resolved.
A Dog’s Purpose is a wonderfully rendered fairy tale from Hollywood’s most magical filmmaker. I laughed, I cried, and I thought about “the meaning of life” as the opening line of the movie asks the audience to do. This is such a rare combination in movies—and people, especially show business people, go on about how Hollywood used to make light and intelligent pictures and bemoan that they’re not like that anymore—that this Universal film, made with Amblin, Walden and others and based on a book by W. Bruce Cameron, deserves 100 percent support.
The best pictures often don’t get what they deserve and A Dog’s Purpose, with a target on it from a group opposed to almost any relationship between pets and humans from the start, is one of them, which I know firsthand. In fact, when the smear campaign against the movie was launched, courtesy of a selectively edited video released for distribution through a trashy website, its own stakeholders were effectively shamed into submission, burying heads in the sand, dodging questions and queries for clarification and cancelling the movie’s premiere. Those who spoke out in defense of the movie, including one of each of its writers, actors and producers and the director, Lasse Hallström (The Hundred-Foot Journey, My Life as a Dog, An Unfinished Life, Chocolat, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen), either came off as defensive or as if they were almost apologizing for the movie in advance. Josh Gad (TV’s The Comedians and Frozen), who does the voice of the dogs, took the bait and denounced purported footage in a controversial video rather than back the movie. Almost no one—not Universal, Amblin or Walden, or Mr. Hallström—chose to condemn the smear campaign, which sanctioned the flawed premise of the attack (that a picture, or pictures that are edited and arranged, is an argument) and passively legitimized a disturbing and potentially dangerous trend against the exercise of free speech. Going to see a movie should not require an act of bravery.
This time, I bought my own ticket on principle. I was joined by another guest when he found out I was going to see A Dog’s Purpose and I was asked again by two friends if they could come, too. The audience at Hollywood’s ArcLight Cinemas was lively and diverse. They were mostly families with young children, single men and single women, seated separately and alone, and couples or groups of friends like us.
Like most of his movies, which are some of the most life-affirming movies ever made, director Lasse Hallström’s A Dog’s Purpose plays to everyone capable of kindness, love and rationality. With a sharp and searching narration, as in An Unfinished Life and his seminal adaptation of John Irving’s novel, The Cider House Rules, intersecting plot lines and multiple characters converge into one poignant point about the whole of one’s life. The action starts, however, with themes of ownership, tagging and naming and what a dog uniquely means to a boy. The particular boy (Bryce Gheisar) to whom this dog first belongs reads comics and books about characters such as Captain America and Tom Sawyer and he grows into a fine teen-ager (K.J. Apa, TV’s Riverdale).
The wholesome, unspoiled quality of the boy’s character adds to the film’s conflict and grounds the movie’s other characters and subplots, building on subtle and gently delivered themes about dog people as peculiar, sad and lonely, and out of step with others, introverted and perhaps deferential to others, too. It’s a keen insight which is easily overlooked amid the dog tales, pathos and humor.
But it’s this type of skillfully woven idea that stirs one’s thoughts and moves one’s emotions in A Dog’s Purpose. So many of these tender truths dot the trail with wisdom, warmth and depth, such as a girl (Britt Robertson, Dan in Real Life, Tomorrowland) winning a prize for herself at a shooting gallery, a hardworking Midwestern father who slowly yet understandably lets himself go or a kid who’s jealous of the star quarterback. Then, there are the short but intelligent, clever or hilarious takes on the rivalry with cats, the sights and aromas of farms, or the irony of overindulging in hot dogs. That’s not to include how a dog’s hard work liberates a stoic policeman. Or that a dog’s companionship aligns in love and life with a college student. Along the multiple incarnations of a dog’s life, imaginatively depicted as foraging for a dog’s purpose, cultural points pop up—a Dynasty smackdown in the 1980s, guns in the 1970s, folk music in the 1960s—and A Dog’s Purpose comes in stunning pictures of a morning fog at the farm, a depressed home with an impoverised dog chained to a post, a happy dog bounding through the field to greet his master. It’s as sentimental as life and I suppose that if A Dog’s Purpose comes off as overly sentimental—a common complaint about Lasse Hallström’s movies—it’s in direct proportion to one’s own cynicism, as usual. This movie is treasure in every scene even when you see the scene coming.
With a cast including The Mod Squad‘s Peggy Lipton and Truth‘s Dennis Quaid in his finest performance since Far From Heaven—and a nice companion role to his quarterback Mike in Breaking Away—A Dog’s Purpose leaps from the screen with wonder, twists and an unequivocal answer to the meaning of life. In what may be his best movie since Chocolat, Lasse Hallström’s A Dog’s Purpose routes life’s loneliness into the chilling, wrenching and marvelous experience of owning and having a dog and with the reward you would almost certainly come to expect.
Has writer and director Damien Chazelle made new magic following his outstanding feature film debut, Whiplash?
Yes, and he does so with depth and delight in a fusion of cities, methods and styles. La La Land, apparently in development for ten years, is both experimental and expressionistic, and it is not a musical as that term applies to classic movies. Also, Ryan Gosling (The Ides of March, The Notebook) as a jazz pianist and Emma Stone (Birdman, Aloha) as an actress, reuniting after Crazy, Stupid, Love, can’t be compared to classic movie stars. As with 2012’s memorably romantic The Artist, which La La Land resembles, it’s best to see, hear and take La La Land as it is.
Opening on the interchange of two of the oldest and newest freeways in Los Angeles, the film’s infused with youthful expression. Riding bikes, doing urban acrobatics, gymnastics and exuberant dancing on cars, lanes and guard rails, La La Land begins with singles getting out of cars to dance. It’s winter in the city of angels and the fantasy sets the movie’s tone as two young strangers have an LA encounter.
Depicting Los Angeles as the world’s vital center for artists and entrepreneurs, Chazelle introduces Stone’s actress in an extended musical sequence involving homage, deflation and the ideal. But he gives the first serious dialogue to Gosling’s musician. Pouring a cup of coffee and playing a vinyl record on the Columbia label, the artist struggles and creates. Amid solid, primary colors, piano playing slips Gosling’s Sebastian into another encounter with Stone’s Mia. The two meet after he’s fired by J.K. Simmons (Whiplash).
In long, sweeping widescreen shots, La La Land lets the two leads sing, dance and glide through auditions, deals, gigs and performances and, of course, newly discovered romance. Tracking the duet in four seasons, Chazelle deliberately spins every reason to hate, doubt or envy this beautiful metropolis into reality-based fanfare. Traffic jams, lone drivers everywhere you look, constant warmth and sunshine; Chazelle depicts everything you’ve heard that outsiders hate about LA as a catalyst for what and whom to love.
La La Land comes with realism. This film is not escapism, despite those minimizing it as such. In fact, what’s most distinctive about this picture is its blended, balanced sense of a whole life, specifically, the whole life of one who creates. Chazelle delves into how hard it is to create; how it’s lonely, stressful and agonizing, including why it costs and why the artist’s life is going to be to some degree cruel, not kind. Like the title, La La Land imports what haters regard as artificial about LA and strips it bare, showing that it’s where the artist creates work that adds value, power and life.
This is what matters in La La land, as detractors dubbed Los Angeles long ago, where the city stokes the virtue of productiveness and the productive enlighten the city. Those who envision, create and pursue goals, from Walt Disney to Damien Chazelle, dream, live, love, fail and refocus, as the movie’s turning point demonstrates when a first date to see Rebel Without a Cause (with its climactic scene at Griffith Park Observatory) at an old movie theater sparks an idea to realize the ideal. Springtime comes and goes, with more auditions, an awakening, more money to make and business to do, a classic convertible and a summertime montage of outings in LA. Slowly, songs get jazzier, people get heavier and more relaxed, and drink goes from wine to beer. Singer John Legend makes an entrance (and major movie debut) as a voice of realism and futurism, if not exactly egoism.
That this crucial mid-point comes with a band called The Messengers speaks to La La Land‘s sole deficiency. As an audio and visual feast, it is too pronounced in certain respects and, yet, Justin Hurwitz’s melodies are muted. Don’t take this to mean that they are not good songs. They fit the context, tone and mood. But they make the audience more aware of the movie than the moment. Lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul elevate the tunes and the movie. So do Mandy Moore’s choreography, costumes by Mary Zophres and Linus Sandgren’s photography. Again, do not expect the caliber of an MGM musical in look, song and dance.
As Mia and Sebastian strive to bring out the best in themselves, autumn casts change in their LA story. With important references to and scenes in Boulder City, Paris and Boise, each loaded with meaning, the music stops, an alarm sounds and someone storms out in the volatility of hard earned magic, love and life. Failure, rejection and regret are depicted with nods, symbols and cues to classic film points, from umbrellas to The Band Wagon. Los Angeles is essentialized and matched to its organic art of storytelling, and heartbreak, in multicolored tablecloths, downtown LA’s Angels Flight and Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont.
When someone says, “This is home” it isn’t long before someone else says, “You’re a storyteller.” La La Land dramatizes in color, music and dance what knowing, understanding and bridging these two statements means.
Pasting a singularly eye-popping segment involving Tom Everett Scott (That Thing You Do) in a small but critical role, a silhouette and a reference to The Red Balloon, La La Land exits with one long, last take toasting the visionary who is both rebel and romantic. It’s a hymn to Los Angeles (and its cousin, Paris), celebrating with lightness and seriousness that LA is where idealists make what’s ideal become something meaningful and real.
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There are exceptions, though, in a few fallible men and one, lone woman. Kazan, working with screenwriter Richard Murphy (who worked with Kazan later on Panic in the Streets), delivers the flawed hero in leading man Dana Andrews. From the beginning, Andrews as the state’s attorney checks and thinks for himself. He’s a man of the people but he is foremost a man of reason. In a key scene, when he’s presented with a dilemma which threatens to destroy his highest value, he gains balance and guidance from principle. Not by merging with the herd, ceding to the mob, or yielding to pure, raw emotion. His inspiration comes from words in a book and it is followed by a scene, really one of her best in pictures, with Jane Wyatt (Jim Anderson’s wife on Father Knows Best) as his wife.
Kramer vs. Kramer also starts (and, ultimately, finishes) with an expression of a mother’s love. Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep in an early and indelible performance) is clearly, deeply disturbed. But her breadwinner husband, Ted (Dustin Hoffman in a skilled and remarkable mid-career transition), can’t get away from work. As ad man Ted’s being put in charge of ads for a commercial airline, his nearly-mad housewife’s packing a bag with their son Billy’s smudged t-shirt packed inside. By the time Ted Kramer comes home to celebrate the good news of his career advancement, casting off an aside about a man in the accounting department who killed himself, he’s ignorant to his mate’s inner torment and shocked by the fact of her imminent breakdown.
You realize this most while watching Ted Kramer read his wife’s letter to Billy. You see in Hoffman’s performance, in his character’s slight vocal tremble, pause and facial paralysis combined with a father’s attempt at composure, the father’s love on display.
Sexism works both ways — irrational discrimination against men as well as against women — and it’s often the individual of the same sex doing the prejudging and discriminating, as Kramer vs. Kramer demonstrates. Man alone, whether in silhouette loving his son, standing in a courthouse or sinking into the furniture in pain and agony, in addition to sorting through his own internal struggle, is an emblem in Kramer vs. Kramer.
