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Kramer vs. KramerRating:
Release Date: 28 August, 2001 Retail Price: $24.95 OUR Price: $21.99 You SAVE: $2.96! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
Kramer vs. Kramer Reviews
Touching portrait of father and son
A career-driven man, insensitive to his wife and son's needs, is suddenly immersed in parenting when his wife (Meryl Streep) leaves him and their son to find herself. Throughout the film, as Ted adjusts to the demands of parenting, his career suffers, but his relationship with his young son grows. Over a year later, when his wife returns and tries to regain custody of the boy, Ted fights to retain custody.
The movie presents a well-done portrait of a family - the conflicting demands of a relationship, parenting and personal growth. It also tells the touching story of a father and son, and the sacrifices the father is willing to make in the name of love. A classic as powerful today as 25 years ago.
Listless
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.
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