Kramer vs Kramer

Director: Robert Benton

1979

26 July 2025

See

Ted (Dustin Hoffman) returns home from the office having landed a big account at his advertising agency and shares the good news with his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep). She in turns shares the bad news that she’s leaving him. The hardest part is who tells their son Billy (Justin Henry) and how do they handle what happens next. 

Think 

From the first morning of just the two boys together, failing at French toast, to the last morning where they make the breakfast together wordlessless, the bond that forms between them is touching. Ted slowly learns how to step up for Billy. From playground accidents, school drop off, neighbour and friend Margaret (Jane Alexander) dropping by or helping out, to awkwardly introducing new girlfriend JoBeth (Phylis Bernard). The two become a team, which when Joanne returns not to rejoin but replace, ends in a court case. 

Feel

Neither is at fault, but both can’t get along. I can't blame Joanna for leaving, even if you can see how it hurts five year-old Billy over the unfolding two years. Which leads to bedside comforting, or walk and talks explaining to a child how a judge decides custody and what will follow. I’m glad Joanna moved to L.A., found work and purpose, and help from a therapist, and realised that even though she needed more that doesn’t mean she’s a bad mother. It’s better that she wants him back then not at all. But I was also moved by Ted’s testimony that just because he’s a man doesn’t mean he can’t care for his son any more or less that a mother can. It’s an oversimplification and highly sanitised divorce and custody dispute. A Marriage Story is a modern update. But both sting with truth of what they represent, even if they lack the complexity of how subsequent relationships are infected by complexity of cuts not being cleaned properly, like Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale or Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women.