I think I remember the ending. Since no one else seems to, I’ll spoilerize it:[spoiler]She is awarded custody, but realizes he would be a better parent after all, and turns the kid over voluntarily.
Of course, I may be wrong, and am just interpreting what probably happened in the actual movie from what seemed to have happened in the MAD spoof. But I think I’m right.[/spoiler]
It’s my own thought on the title.
And AppallingGael’s spoiler about the ending is correct.
Damn good thought. Even though I can’t recall many details it’s a better description of the movie I remember as a whole.
One interesting thing I’ve heard is that Hoffman apparently got quite involved in the role. Hoffman’s known as a method actor who tries to get “inside” his characters. And, by coincidence, Hoffman was going through a real life divorce at the time he was making this movie. So he used the feelings from his real divorce to build up the character of Ted. And as a result, he developed very hostile feelings towards Streep during the production.
To his credit, he was able to focus and keep it all in the performance. Streep said she found about all this later and she hadn’t realized at the time how Hoffman felt towards her.
Mostly correct, IMHO.
She spoke of how she was going to decorate the boy’s room in her apartment the way it was in the dad’s apartment “so he could feel like he was at home.” The realization that their son would consider being with dad “at home” forced her to understand, not that he was a better parent, but that she wasn’t, and that the kid would be happier not to be torn away from the perfectly adequate dad.
It’s a subtle distinction, but I think it’s valid.
Haven’t seen it in well over a decade, maybe two. When I did see it, I remember thinking:
This is an Oscar-bait version of an ABC After School Special. The plot twist at the end was silly.
This is like Shakespeare in Love vs. Saving Private Ryan - the movie was more “of the moment” vs. the big-statement-war-movie of Apocalypse, but seems super dated now.
I liked the SNL spoof, Kramer Vs. Godzilla:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/79/79kgodzilla.phtml
Mad did a pretty good spoof, too. The kid had a line in that one about how his dad (Dustin Hoffman) ended up with a “hottie”, and didn’t realize until much later (when she wrote in to Mad herself) that the “hottie” was JoBeth Williams, the Mom in Poltergeist.
I saw the movie itself, but it says a lot (about me?) that I remember the parodies better than the film.
I saw it when it first came out, and I love Dustin Hoffman’s work, but I agree with those who say it is a melodrama. Those don’t age well IME. THe ending was too pat, and the scene where Dustin Hoffman is telling his son why Mommy left was cringe-worthy. Hoffman did his considerable best to sell it, but it pinged my Creep-O-Meter.
Never saw it again after the first time.
Regards,
Shodan
I saw it in 1979, and liked it a lot.
It was more than 20 years later that I saw it again, and while I still thought there were some great performances (Justin Henry was remarkably good for such a little boy), the movie just didn’t hold up that well.
In some ways, that’s a reflection of how the world has changed. Today, it no longer seems like a big deal to suggest that a Dad can make breakfast and take care of his kids as well as a Mom can… which takes a lot of the edge off the drama.
I agree. It was of it’s time, when the idea of a father as a sole, loving, competent caregiver was not something everyone agreed was even possible, much less a good idea. The same thing is played for laffs in the wildly dated “Mr. Mom.”
To me it seemed the film was rather kind to Mr. Kramer… Who was a completely negligent father before the Joanna’s walk- out. You have to wonder if it would have happened at all if he had put any energy into his family life whatsoever.
I remember seeing it many years ago and liking it, especially the scenes of Hoffman & the kid having breakfast together. Whenever the kid stayed with him, they’d make french toast in the morning and talk and have fun.
The morning of the hearing where Hoffman was going to lose the kid, they went through the motions of making french toast, but silently and stoically. I found that scene in particular very well done and sad.
Back then, the Academy was mostly filled with men–older, conservative–so a weepy about a man bonding with his son while also taking a swipe at this new-fangled “feminism” was going to register on virtually all cylinders. Streep does a great job with a thankless character who’s depicted as both capricious and entitled. The film mostly dates because we’re now used to seeing similar (but more sophisticated) things on TV, whereas back then, episodic TV rarely came close to tackling this subject.
Of course, the following year, another film about an upper-class father bonding with his son despite the best efforts of a shrewish matriarch, all to the similar strains of Baroque music, also won Best Picture. Ordinary People is a better film in my book, though still not as good as some of the films it beat.
The analogy to Shakespeare is a bad one, though. Unlike the contemporary Kramer, there’s nothing “timely” about the Bard comedy. And it hasn’t dated since, either (regardless of how much you may have liked it when it first came out). The reason it won was because it was a film about Acting and performance, and given that the actors constitute the largest Academy branch (with writers and directors also heavily represented), it should come as no surprise that a film that celebrates this tradition should’ve been embraced so fully by so much of AMPAS.
That scene served as a bookend for the other french toast scene, the day after his wife left. The quiet efficiency that the two shared when making the toast at end was contrasting the chaos, lack of communication, and lack of synchronicity present at the beginning. It seems like a somewhat obvious, yet effective way at portraying the growth in their relationship.
The movie has a number of quiet scenes that let the audience make their own interpretations of what was transpiring instead of blatantly telling you things. I think it was all the little directorial touches that made it a great movie and worthy of an Oscar. Steep and Hoffman certainly helped.
The movie is a little dated, but not nearly as much as The Graduate or Easy Rider. I think even today, people can relate to the situation. And, while sometimes it can be a bit hokey, I think it successfully rides the line of melodrama, backing off before it becomes glurge.
To late to edit.
By coincidence, I just saw this on DVD a couple of days ago (after not having seen it since its release and remembering very little). I was expecting manipulative melodrama, but found it to be a nice, quiet, engaging film. It is filled with very well done “moments”, some of which other posters have mentioned.
I’ve seen it a couple of times relatively recently. All of the scenes with the kid were great, but the scenes with Dustin Hoffman at work were kind of hit and miss.
The movie loaded the dice like crazy by making Streep’s character, the mother, almost totally unsympathetic, and giving us virtually no insight into her point of view (except a few platitudes at the beginning about “finding herself” or some such nonsense - I don’t remember exactly, I saw it on first run).
There was also, IIRC, a big plot hole in that at least part of the mother’s case for getting custody was that she was now making far more money than the father (Hoffman). However, the father’s originally high powered career had gone down the tubes precisely because he had taken on the responsibility for taking care of the boy by himself. (As I recall, he did not become unemployed, or even poor, but just ceased to be the high flying high earner that he had been before she left and dumped the kid on him. Now she, as a single woman, was the high flying high earner instead.) I was baffled by the fact that his lawyers never thought to point out that, if the mother got custody, and actually took care of her son, her earnings were likely to go way down in just the same way that his had.
I think this is where it is a little dated. I got the impression that filmmakers had to show her flawed in some way to make it believable that Hoffman had a chance to get custody. Even today, family court overwhelmingly favors the mother in custody hearings. At the time, it would be the default if she breathing (and wanted custody). The filmmakers wanted both Hoffman and Streep to be somewhat unsympathetic at the start.
The “find herself” angle allowed her to be a good mother as part of the marriage, but not one capable of supporting her child on her own. She testified that she was “incapable of functioning” when she left and would not have been able to provide another. It was only through therapy (dum-dum!) that she was able to become productive once again. I thought it was a very clean solution to explain why custody was even an issue.