by Chris Marshall:
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Kramer vs. Kramer far exceeded my expectations, but I’m afraid that’s
understating it a bit, as I had very low expectations. Perhaps a more glowing
endorsement would be to say that it is a very good film by any measure.
I should have known that a collaboration between Dustin
Hoffman and Meryl Streep in their primes would be decent at worst, but
sometimes I forget that the plot of a movie isn’t its defining element. I
expected to be bored, and that wasn’t the case at all. Part of the problem was
that it simply didn’t have the same reputation as the other winners in the
1970s, so I judged it unfairly based on the level of competition. Whatever
excuse I could use, I was wrong.
This isn’t a movie about plot. It’s about characters. You
could almost view Kramer vs. Kramer as
the dramatic/tragic counterpart to Annie Hall, as they are both about the deterioration of a relationship. The
difference is that in the former, a child is involved, which adds an extra
level of complication to the whole deal.
