The Kramer vs Kramer review

I was just browsing through the stacks of the new DVD shop that had opened in my area a few weeks back. I was fresh from seeing The Graduate and to be quite honest, I was still swaying under Dustin Hoffman's performance. It had been quite some time, since I had seen one of his movies, The Rainman and I was looking around for some more of him on the shelves - anything!

Lady luck was with me, as I fished out Kramer vs Kramer from one corner and didn't even think twice as I walked out of the place, holding it under my arm in a brown paper bag. I could hardly wait to get into my easy chair and take my Home Theatre remote in my hand and peek into the personal lives of Ted and Joana Kramer. The movie begins with a light strumming of the guitar and just as the title appears on the right of the screen, a mandolin joins in, to offer, I think, one of the opening titles tracks that I have heard in a long, long time. Simple, yet very effective.

Mrs Kramer fades into the screen, wishing her son goodnight and goodbye, finally beating off the creative seclusion that she had been facing under her workaholic husband for the last eight years of their married life. Even as he comes into the movie, we see that Joana Kramer has reason to complain - even as she prepares to leave, he tries to make a phone call, leaf through some papers and look very distracted. Even as she walks out on him, he thinks she's just pulling a fast one and will be back within a few hours at the most.

What begins from there is Ted Kramer balancing home and office for the next few months and doing so pretty well. So what if he doesn't know how to make French toast for this son in the morning, he sure can learn! And he does - he learns it so well, that you feel he had been doing this all his life. The way he and his seven year old son balance each other, you forget that Joana Kramer ever existed. But will she allow you to do that?

She had tried her hand at various occupations and now she is back in New York. She earns a fat salary and now, she wants her son back. They go to court - she wins the case, but she can't take the boy back. "This is his home..." she says!

What really stands out in this movie, more than Dustin Hoffman's and Meryll Streep's performance, are the situations that are created. The first day between father and son, where Ted Kramer makes French Toast for his son, shows his absolute inability to come to terms with household needs and the day when Billy is to be taken away by his mother, both father and son make better French Toast then perhaps the French themselves. The scene where Billy meets his father's business associate in the nude is remarkable and cannot be explained in words.

The music, like I said, is simple yet striking. Only the use of the guitar and the mandolin in most cases, makes the soundtrack alone, heard over and over again. Great performances come in from Justin Henry and Jane Alexander. The photography is simply amazing and yet, like the music, simple!

Kramer vs Kramer is a must for all cinema lovers, leave alone Dustin Hoffman fanatics like me .......

Happy viewing!