Sometimes the older film with which I pair the recent one has a tenuous connection to it, if even that. While I tend to pride myself on being imaginative in those cases, here’s one where the later film has often been compared to a specific earlier one. TV Tropes even calls it the Spiritual Successor.
Although the people behind Marriage Story had plenty to celebrate, since the film got seven Oscar nominations, many of which were in major categories, and won Best Supporting Actress, Kramer Vs. Kramer was something else entirely! It won not just Best Supporting Actress, but Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay! In fact, if Columbia had chosen to campaign for Streep as Best Actress instead of Supporting Actress I think she could have conceivably won, and then Kramer Vs. Kramer would have been one of only four films to win all of the four biggest Oscars plus one for its screenplay.* It was also the highest grossing movie of 1979 by nearly a 20% margin!
It seems crazy to me that a simple movie about divorce could have such a gargantuan effect on both the industry and on audiences but let me put on my professor hat** and give a sociological lecture.
Although for decades women had been going to college, it was by and large to get their “M.R.S.” degrees. However, women’s autonomy took a huge step forward in the early 70s, when the pill was invented, and when Roe v. Wade was passed. Suddenly, with an unplanned pregnancy much less of a threat, women were free to pursue all sorts of careers. The movement for equality, which has been a struggle for women throughout American history and became most dramatic during the fight for suffrage, had bit by bit over the decades led to women having rights such as bank accounts and property in their own name and now that truly meant something since they could earn real money!
Nowadays you see conservatives sneering, “Back in my day a woman knew her place” and showing a picture representing their grandparents to model traditional family values. Of course, women in that era didn’t really have a choice but to stay with their husbands, when they couldn’t legally do anything on their own. The fact that they remained married certainly doesn’t mean they were happy indentured servants.
So, in the 70s we had a world of new options available to women, but naturally also had men not liking the new dynamic when they were hoping to come home to doting housewives just like their dads and grandpas had. It’s no wonder that the 70s were the one time in American history that the cliché about half of all marriages ending in divorce was actually true. Those men would probably point to the fact that they were married, and maybe had female friends, as supposed proof they weren’t misogynists, but would browbeat their wives if said wives wanted their own lives outside of the house instead of fulfilling the marriage contract according to the terms the men expected.
Ted Kramer is such a man. I don’t think he’s a bad guy; just a product of his times. He has an attitude that he alone is the family’s breadwinner and he can joke with his old boy’s club about how silly it is his wife wanted a different arrangement. That would have been the norm just a decade or two earlier. However, now his wife develops depression when he denies her the opportunities she sees available for a career. So much so that she eventually leaves him at the start of the movie, taking only as much money as she personally had saved before the marriage.
Even now women are shamed for wanting identities separate from motherhood, and that judgement was a magnitude or so higher in the 70s. Joanna actually feels like an unfit mother for getting depressed over not having a career and feels their little boy would be better alone with Ted than her.
After watching Marriage Story, about the divorce of a couple in my generation, it was interesting comparing it to Kramer Vs. Kramer, a film made before I was born. Charlie is like Ted, in that he tunes out his wife’s desire for a separate identity, but Charlie is already a doting father and the entire film is about the battle over custody of Henry. Ted, however, was indoctrinated to believe that it’s the man’s responsibility to bring home the paycheck while it’s the woman’s to take care of the child*** Thus, roughly the first half of the movie is about Ted learning childcare.
Part of the reason the movie is so compelling is because Ted is a strong, determined main character. I feel for all the women I see complaining on social media about manbabies they must deal with – men who, instead of pulling their weight around the house, expect their wives to serve like mothers. Or, almost as bad, will only help if asked, thus making their wives serve as project manager in addition to employee for the house.
Ted seems like he may have been that way during the marriage, but from the first morning after his wife leaves he does his best to be a homemaker and caretaker instead of bemoaning his new responsibilities and placing an undue amount on the small boy. He asks what his child wants for breakfast and tries to make exactly what Billy requests – French toast. He fails miserably due to his lack of experience, but he only gets better at his home duties. Despite still having a prestigious career as an advertising executive, he makes it a point to take his kid to fun activities and only so much as raises his voice when the child flagrantly disobeys him. Even then the worst he does is forcibly put the child to bed, and he still feels bad enough that he apologizes and tearfully acknowledges that he’s the reason Billy’s mother no longer lives with them.
A huge difference between Kramer Vs. Kramer and Marriage Story is the role of the child. In the latter Henry doesn’t have much agency, merely being the prize for which both parents strive. He can’t even read, despite being well past the age where he should be able to do it well. On the other hand, Billy is a wonderful character. As played by Justin Henry, Billy avoids being precocious and feels like the most authentic portrayal I’ve seen of a small child. He really wants nothing more than to eat tasty food, play, and feel loved, and he can’t help but cry when he’s not getting what he wants. Henry became the youngest nominee in Oscar history, getting a Supporting Actor nod at age eight. He lost to veteran Melvyn Douglas, who had refused to attend the ceremony, calling the notion of him competing with an eight-year-old “absurd”. I wish the Academy had stuck it to Douglas by giving Henry the award, or at least not giving it to Douglas, but oh well.
The biggest thing Kramer Vs. Kramer and Marriage Story have in common is that the custody dispute plays a huge part in the story. We see the sorts of stops people have to pull out to give themselves a fighting chance, and we see how far below the belt lawyers will go to help their client win, and we see the way dads and moms are treated differently. In both films it’s enthralling.
I only have one small and one big complaint about Kramer Vs. Kramer.
The small complaint is that the neighbor’s story doesn’t really go anywhere. We spend the whole movie thinking she and Ted will end up together, but at the end she reveals she took her ex-husband back. That feels inauthentic to the character, and a letdown after all the buildup.
The big complaint is that we get zero scenes of Joanna and Billy alone. I understand the movie is about Ted’s journey, but when Joanna returns, after starting a successful career of her own and getting therapy to learn she’s not a bad person for wanting one, the movie’s central conflict is that she seeks custody of Billy. It would be great if we got to see some of the time they spend together, so we can grasp what a special bond they have. I also would have really loved to see Joanna’s coming to the decision she reached at the end, instead of just hearing about it, and really would have loved to see her sharing the news with Billy so we could get his reaction. We know he loves his dad, but some more depth as far as his feelings for his mom would have made for a more dynamic story.
As far as how this movie ends, as with Marriage Story it has less to do with what’s fair and more to do with what makes the child happy. Avery Corman, the writer of the Kramer Vs. Kramer novel, received a ton of acclaim from people for how groundbreakingly he depicted divorce, but his favorite letter was from a little girl asking if his parents were divorced. That was the key for him – the writing was an outlet for the pain with which he had dealt.
Divorce can be such a complicated issue, especially when there’s a child involved. Often there’s no right or wrong, other than what makes the innocent person, the child, happy. Congratulations to Kramer Vs. Kramer (and its Spiritual Successor) for depicting the matter in such a gripping way.
Bottom line: Great job.
*Along with It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Silence of the Lambs. I wish my favorite movie American Beauty were in that category too. Stupid Hilary Swank.
**I don’t have my Ph.D. yet but did teach a class once. I was humble enough to refer to myself as a “Lecturer”, but students kept addressing me as “Professor”.
***Of course Donald Drumpf said that even while campaigning for president, going so far as calling diaper changing “women’s work”. Yet he still got not only most white male votes, but 53% of white female votes. That number is driven by older, uneducated, married Christian white women who have been told the Bible says they should be subservient to men and who claim they never feel more empowered than when they’re caring for their home and children like God intended. Then these evangelicals will say things like school shootings happen nowadays because of the decline of traditional family values. Clearly there’s still a lot of progress to be made but I’ll step off my soapbox for now.
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