Kramer vs. Kramer
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.42 You Save: $6.57 (44%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.92 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Kramer vs. Kramer
Movie Review: 1979. Oh yeah.
Summary: 4 Stars
So divorce and child custody were huge issues in 1979. Hee haw. I think the bigger, more timely issue that plays out in KvK is Hoffman's insensitivity to Streep's wish to live a more fulfilling and well rounded life. At first it's hard to get drawn into Streep's perspective, especially with the Adam Rich clone making cute with Daddy Kramer. You start off thinking, "How could she just up and leave that little muppet? Bad mommy!" Some may question the Streep Best Support Actress deal, but her courtroom performance in the last act fills in the gaps and you can finally empathize with her.I don't like the tacked on last scene. It kills it.
Movie Review: Dated, But Lovable
Summary: 4 Stars
Sure, Meryl Streep can read a phone book and score, but this movie is so dated, I thought I was gonna die! Not to mention that Mr. and Mrs. Kramer both make about $30,000/year in this film from 1979. What a bummer reminder!Otherwise, it is a well acted, high quality scripted film. Hoffman should have won an Oscar, as well. Although this topic seemed more relevant in the '70's, one can still appreciate the agony all characters went through. Great, great acting!
Movie Review: 3 stars out of 4
Summary: 4 Stars
The Bottom Line:
A competent and interesting drama, Kramer vs. Kramer is almost certainly not as good a film as Apocalypse Now (which it beat out at the 1980 Academy Awards) but it's well-acted and solidly made and worth sitting down with for two hours.
Movie Review: Listless
Summary: 3 Stars
They used to give out Juvenile Awards at the annual Oscars, that is if a performer stood out ahead of the pack and gave an outstanding performance. Shirley Temple won the first one, and in subsequent years Judy Garland won another, so did Mickey Rooney, Deanna Durbin, right down to Hayley Mills. Instead of the full size Oscar we know, the juvie Oscars were tiny little things, cute and pintsize. Too bad they stopped this custom, and instead decided to throw the kids right in with a pack of sharks they call adult actors. Justin Henry who played the little boy in KRAMER VS KRAMER was nominated for an Oscar in 1979. He ran opposite ancient Melvyn Douglas, and even oddly enough against Mickey Rooney, the preminent boy star in Hollywood, then all grown up and a sad prophecy of what would happen to a child star who had seen better days.
Poot little Justin shouldn't have been put in this position. If the Academy had just given him his special Oscar we might not have had the unpleasant experience of watching his career stall like a Duesenberg in Katonah River mud. Years later, when he played the little brother in SIXTEEN CANDLES, American gasped in horror remembering how sweet he had been as the abandoned Kramer Jr, with his sheepdog hair and his forever trembling lower lip, like a strawberry. As the brat in SIXTEEN CANDLES he rolled onto the screen like a tumbleweed, overweight, sulky, a dead zombie look in his eyes, throwing sexual innuendo in every direction, the parents' worst nightmare, as if to say, this is what would happen if your mother let your father bring you up in the dog eat dog world of Manhattan advertising.
Meryl Streep (selfish) and Dustin Hoffman (selfless) played the parents, and both of them are fine, though you really, really, REALLY have to love Hoffman to sit through this picture without gagging. Not since the glory days of the 1940s "weepies" has a saint been presented in cinematic form with such humorless and melodramatic closeups as Hoffman gets here, his beady eyes welling with tears that shine luminously as the human spirit itself.
Meryl Streep explains that she had to go find herself. It was a brave part especially at the beginning of a long career. No one who saw KRAMER VS KRAMER when it first came out ever was able to look at her again without thinking in the back of their heads, "There she is, the selfish one. Thinks only of herself."
SIXTEEN CANDLES by the way was a much better picture than this critical darling. As the years go by and more and more couples get divorced or never even bother marrying in the first place, the movie has lost some of its punch. It was always a fairy tale, now it's just listless, a beast without Beauty.
Movie Review: Not aging well.
Summary: 3 Stars
Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979)
Okay, I'll admit it, almost thirty years later I wanted to see Kramer vs. Kramer again solely for the JoBeth Williams scene. Yes, I am shallow. It's all I really remembered from the movie, other than Meryl Streep's "I make thirty-one thousand dollars" speech. And it's just as much fun this time around as it was when I originally saw the movie over twenty-five years ago. (I'm obviously not the only one who thinks so; the first keyword for the movie at IMDB is "nude wearing glasses".) I was reminded, however, of much of the reason I seem to have forgotten the rest of the movie, which has not aged well at all.
Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and Joanna (Meryl Streep) Kramer are married with child, Billy (Justin Henry). All is not well in casa de Kramer, however, and Joanna runs off to find herself, leaving Ted with Billy. Ted, who has spent much of his time working and very little of it with Billy, has to learn to connect with the lil' bugger while simultaneously learning to be a single parent. Nine months and one lost job later, that's finally happened-- and then Joanna shows back up and wants custody of her kid. Cue dirty custody battle.
As enjoyable as the movie is on the surface-- and I certainly won't deny that the film is as well-acted as one would expect from a cast that includes not only the above but a whole host of the seventies A-list-- but Benton, adapting Avery Corman's novel for the big screen, manages to work in just about as many single-parent clichés and stereotypes as he possibly can. (Whether they were present in the novel or magically appeared in the script, I don't know.) Sure, he plays them wonderfully-- the recurring French-toast theme, for example-- but that doesn't make them any less cliché or stereotyped. Oh, look, here's the doofus dad who knows nothing about parenting! At least the idiotic Mr. Mom made no bones about the fact that it was idiotic. Kramer vs. Kramer wanted to pass itself off as intelligent comedy-drama, and did so well enough that it scored a Best Picture Oscar back when such a thing actually meant something. (Assuming it ever did, your call.) These days, cast and all, I wonder whether this movie would even make it to the theaters, or whether it would be sentenced to the Lifetime Movie Purgatory-- err, Network.
Yes, it's certainly a watchable film, if dated nowadays, but in the slightly more enlightened society in which we now live, I hope the script's defects are a lot clearer to those watching it now. ** ½