On View: Alone Together

Even the most vapid marriages, even those in which the passions have long since cooled and the common ground of interest much eroded, are saved sometimes, if only in name, by reference to the pious argument: we stay together for the sake of the children. How The Children are benefited by constant exposure to a loveless marriage is not often explained; it is enough to mouth the platitude, to hope that repetition will inspire belief and belief reality.

Our grandparents may have longed for divorce but they rarely ran with their longings, if they felt such longings. They made do. For better or worse. All in all, the American marriages of our grandparents’ generation seemed workable enough, and for the woman, being miserable together with her man at least beat being scandalous alone without him. For the sake of public opinion sufficed as an encompassing reason to stick with the wrong mate. For the sake of the children came into vogue later, and most likely it worked about as well, masking real emotions with a presumed virtue.

Nowadays neither routine washes. The divorce rate rushes to meet the marriage rate; at present nearly at the halfway point, in future it will most likely go well beyond that mark. The census statistics tell a morose story: in the next decade we had best expect that half the youngsters will grow up in one-parent households; weekend fathers and to a much lesser extent weekend mothers will number in the many tens of millions—McDonald’s parents, some sophisticates call them. The children will also do.

The cinema, contrary to myth, is rarely ahead of the public in depicting experience. Movies are usually found trailing a few lengths behind Real Life. As witness Kramer vs. Kramer, closely based on Avery Corman’s novel of the same name. Here we have one of the few film treatments, and among that few the best, of an increasingly common phenomenon: the broken marriage, the deserting wife, the father raising his child alone. In the beginning they were three: Joanna and Ted and little Billy. Then Joanna cut loose, and now there are two: Ted and little Billy. It is the choice stuff of soap opera in theme, though genuinely affecting and quite convincing in Corman’s hands. And even more so in Robert Benton’s flawlessly acted movie, a movie as carefully and intelligently made as any we have seen in recent years. Kramer vs. Kramer tells a story to which only a stone would be unresponsive. It is at once a broad, generalized statement about contemporary American marriage and a unique incident unmistakable for any other.

Just what went wrong in Joanna and Ted Kramer’s marriage is never entirely clear, either to Ted and Joanna or to the audience. These are the most decent of young moderns: bright, attractive, considerate, upwardly mobile—he does brilliant things for his advertising agency; she moves along, as expected, in his world; they adore their six-year-old son; they are ideal. At least they look the part. But Joanna packs her bags, kisses her sleeping son goodbye, waits for Ted’s return from the office, tells him to pick up the dry cleaning, and off she goes. He thinks it’s a phase: she’ll come back. She doesn’t. He can’t understand why, nor can Billy, with whom suddenly the father must now make a life. The story could not be more mundane for the next three-quarters of an hour, as Ted learns how to balance work and raising a son, how to expand himself until the boy can survive the loss of his mother, how to do, as Billy puts it, what “the other mothers” do—how, in some cases, not to do what “the other mothers” do, at least not so well.

We see the love between Ted and his son in the most humble situations: this is not the story of the debonair playboy shepherding his heir to the glittering watering holes of the world; it is dad taking the kid out to a park, escorting him to school, rushing him to the hospital when he falls from a height, cheering him on through the agonies of a kiddie pageant. Joanna disappears from our thoughts as from their lives.

And Joanna reappears after seventeen months, having found herself at the other end of the continent, having come back to New York City from California, ready at last to reclaim her son. The title refers, of course, to the court battle for custody, in which, for all that our sympathies are almost entirely with Ted, Joanna makes the simple and ultimately successful point that whatever her faults she is still Billy’s mother. The Law, as millions of divorced fathers know, rarely denies custody to an attractive, gainfully employed, contrite, and obviously loving mother. If Joanna played the villain at the start, she manages to convince the judge that she has been reborn. Ted must prepare Billy for changed circumstances. Joanna comes to claim the child. A very gratifying thing happens. Curtain.

Could the story be more carefully constructed to leave us bawling in the aisles? Benton’s triumph, and his cast’s, is in transcending the plot outline by the film realization. Every chance to milk an extra sob is passed by: the child is wounded in that fall but he doesn’t lose his eye. The friendly neighbor lady is not transformed into the fairy godmother of the motherless Kramer household. Ted does not become a celibate: he brings home a voluptuous date who chances, nude, to meet Billy, pyjamaed, on the way to the john. We are subjected to no saints-and-sinners nonsense, nor are we thought incapable of appreciating the poignancy of the situation without being buried in glop. The movie is funny as well as tender, and hard-nosed about everything: Ted loses his excellent job because his work suffers, and he bullies his way into another, though lesser, job in order to stand a half-chance at winning custody in the courtroom; the child is adorable but no paragon of little-manly heroism, in fact he is a pain; the flow of events and of characters, throughout, is matter-of-fact. Even more than Avery Corman’s novel, which is underwritten, spare, loath to settle for cheap sentimentality when genuine sentiment will suffice, Robert Benton’s film is constructed on the less-is-more foundation. It never overdoes. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep made Ted and Joanna as familiar to us as our best friends. Streep (The Deer Hunter) has to date had no better role than this, nor, since Midnight Cowboy, has Hoffman. Hoffman’s strength as Ted is the exquisitely honed edge of desperation sheathed in deliberate intention. Hoffman’s Ted is a man pushed nearly to the edge but intent upon parenting properly, and intent also upon holding on to his boy. Streep, in this least sympathetic of all her screen roles, manages to whiplash the audience: we are sorry for her, then we say good riddance to her, then we know just how she feels, after which we hate her guts, and finally we love her dearly. Streep’s voice never turns shrill, her face never contorts in anger, she never says an unkind word, she manages within those constraints to run us ragged through her emotions as if they were ours, or at least as if we could imagine them ours. Ted and Joanna’s marriage wasn’t made in Heaven, but Streep’s and Hoffman’s screen symbiosis is divine. In a year that presented us with Ricky Schroder (The Champ) and the giant economy size Kleenex box to help us abide the movie that so cynically instructed us to adore that child, audiences may come to Justin Henry’s Billy in Kramer vs. Kramer expecting the worst. But save for the fact that the neophyte actor does not look as if he has aged seventeen months, he does win us totally, the brat and little-boy-lost rolled into one. Also notable are Jane Alexander as the neighbor and Howard Duff as Ted’s expensive, savvy attorney, as well as the two dozen players with lesser parts. The elements jibe. Benton’s writing carries the story with a bare minimum of pontification, the music (by Purcell and Vivaldi) is infrequent and never intrusive, the acting (it cannot be said too many times) is superlative. If Kramer vs. Kramer were intended as propaganda for some Divorced Fathers In Quest of Justice lobby, it might well have been assembled with a shrewder eye for polarity; it would have required a martyr bursting out of Ted and a bitch simmering within Joanna. This is no ideological tract, however, either on the page or on screen. This is a prolonged episode in the lives of three people who would very much rather have stayed together if they could, but who couldn’t, and so didn’t, and, in a contemporary way, a way repugnant to the generations of our past, managed to make do.

Three other recent films work kindred material with varying results. Rich Kids, saddled both with an atroci-story) and with a stupid climax, plays around the fringes of the effect, of divorce on children. Jamie (Jeremy Levy) is a young old-pro at the separate families game, swift and bearably cunning in his exploitation of the potential gains to be had from two families, and he nicely instructs his new friend Franny (Trini Alvarado) in precisely how to handle the revelation scene to come. The girl will be taken to a restaurant—better make it a cuisine you won’t mind detesting ever after, he advises her—where mom and dad will announce that they are going their separate ways, after which it is expected that the child will retch. It’s a sly little flick, which tosses in a modicum of sociology to lay claim to some merit outside itself, along with some pedagogical worth, but concentrates wisely on gently tickling us with the awkwardness of adults and coyly teasing us with the possibility (as it happens, unrealized) of barely pubescent sexuality. The most these two brainy darlings do is bubble-bathe together, but getting there is most of the fun, and all the fun is Rich Kids’ commercially successful manner of refusing to grapple with the grim reality of divorce and the junior products of divorce. Rich Kids has a little bit of something for almost everyone, but not a whole lot for anybody interested in sustained mood, much less for anybody who might like to spend his four bucks and his two hours with a movie committed to seriously exploring a troubling theme.

If Rich Kids centers on the kids (which at least gives it an almost fresh perspective, because these youngsters are gifted without being unendurably adultish) but slides right by the central problem, Running remembers now and again that divorced parents have children, and when the children make an appearance the movie is the better for it. But at heart it is the story of a man who can sustain nothing—not his marriage, not a job, not his father-daughters relationship—until he can buckle down and run himself right into the Olympics. The worst burden the two daughters bear is the thought that their father is nuts, which is overcome in an instant when he qualifies for the Olympic team; suddenly his mania for running seems more than passably normal to his blithe, blonde, conformist children, not to mention all the children left over from Rocky II, who jog along in Michael’s path and cheer him on to the big race. Michael Douglas plays Michael, Susan Anspach, his wife, and both are good, as is the movie, for a movie about a man who can bear to say adios so long as he has his Ádidas. But, like Rich Kids, Running doesn’t quite know what to do with the leftovers; that is, the children.

The Last Married Couple in America is the most recent of the four pictures we are considering, the latest to misuse the talents of George Segal, and the least cogent of the movies in its treatment of the subject of marital discord. This comedy should win at least one star for bothering to provide its squabbling couple with three sons, and even permitting one of them to be pudgy, but then neglecting to make any of them at all memorable. I got the feeling watching Natalie Wood and Segal struggle with their material that the committee that had slapped the movie together remembered only at the last minute that Mr. and Mrs. America are supposed to have children, then ran out to La Cienega Boulevard and dragged in the first three lads they met. Most likely that impression grew simply out of my perverse desire to throw the book at director Gilbert Cates, screenwriter John

Herman Shaner, and producers Edward S. Feldman, Al Ramrus, and Shaner. Quite unfair of me, I grant, like their atrocious movie, which is unfair to the talented actors who were obliged to make fools of themselves, unfair to the types who are so grotesquely transformed into stereotypes, unfair to the movie audiences who deserve better than such cynical manipulation. A farce would be nice; even a slapstick comedy has its advantages; but a witty, comic gloss thinly applied over a dark theme would be swell. The Last Married Couple in America might even have offered something memorable had it consciously worked to lead us at the end to the sudden realization that we were dealing here with a couple so Me-oriented that they never considered their children at all. But that’s not it, not in the least. Every fifteen minutes or so the boys are trotted out, dropped into some bit of nonsense, then caused to disappear. It is a film that lacks the courage of any conviction. Its “goofy” co-star is Dom DeLuise, who is untethered for ten minutes to do a plumber who would rather be an X-rated film actor but who settles for an affair with a grey-haired hooker. It offers us Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”) with a bleach job, in the role of the wife’s best friend, conniving to seduce the husband. It lets Richard Benjamin go: Richard Benjamin is routinely let go these days, flipped into one mediocre movie after another, wherein he is ordered to flop about and be silly. In this thing he plays the guy who supposedly delights in not being married any longer, but who really ... and of course you get the picture. Segal and Wood are expected to convince an audience that they are the only couple in their set, even including the gay couple, who are still madly in love and ecstatically content, and then that one awkward fall into somebody else’s bed is enough to make of the perfect husband a louse in wifey’s eyes. Within the space of half a year Mr. Segal has been teamed with Glenda Jackson (Lost and Found) and with Ms. Wood, both of whom offer more substance in their pinkies than he can manage in his whole frame. With Jackson, Segal crumbled beneath the actress; with Wood, Segal goes down before a hideous script, a pointlessness of view that is appalling, and an obliviousness to the meaning of the characters’ unraveling marriage upon those sons we are expected to believe they cherish. The Last Married Couple in America is the last movie anybody who enjoys movies ought to be forced to see. But in a sense it is exactly what the American cinema seems best able to do, at least in the vast majority of cases. Since, as I have remarked perhaps too often in this space over the months, the movies don’t reflect reality except inadvertently, at least most of the time, a piece of fluff like Last Married Couple is far closer to the audience’s expectations than a gloriously whole endeavor like Kramer vs. Kramer. How could anybody hope that a film that can’t even do the Weird Party scene properly would want to waste a moment contemplating the meaning of “splitsville” on the children? This is a film for those who couldn’t care less. Kramer vs. Kramer asks something a bit more demanding of its audience: that we don’t mind having to think.

LR’s film critic reviews also for WNAC-TV (CBS) in Boston, hosts “The David Brudnoy Show” on WHDH-AM, also in Boston, and writes a thriceweekly newspaper column. He is Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex County, Massachusetts.