‘Kramer vs. Kramer’: A brutally honest portrait of Boomer fatherhood

It’s a classic mealtime standoff.

On one side we have newly minted single father Ted (Dustin Hoffman), pushing a gross TV dinner Salisbury steak. On the other we have Ted’s 7-year-old, Billy (Justin Henry), his spoon poised in defiance above an illicitly obtained tub of ice cream.

There’s little cuteness in Ted and Billy’s relationship — much credit should go to the excellent Henry as well as Hoffman — and the moments of levity and calm are hard-fought.

After a tense few seconds, Billy takes the plunge. Ted snatches him up, kicking and screaming, and tosses him in his room. “I hate you!” shouts Billy. Ted should just walk away, but he can’t resist the following rejoinder before he slams the door: “I hate you right back, you little s**t!”

Bad dad

That must have felt great, right? At least for that split second before it started feeling awful. If you haven’t been there, “Kramer vs. Kramer” may not be the movie for you. If you have, well, welcome to one of the most honest movies about the frustrations of fatherhood you’ll ever see.

“Kramer vs. Kramer” came out in 1979, and since then the workaholic family man who needs to Learn What’s Really Important has become a time-honored multiplex staple. Harrison Ford (“Regarding Henry”), Adam Sandler (“Click”), Jim Carrey (“Liar Liar”) and Eddie Murphy (“Imagine That”), to name a few, have all put their stamp on the role. And perhaps you’ve seen that movie where Michael Keaton gets reincarnated as a snowman.

But Hoffman’s Ted Kramer is uniquely, uncomfortably real. Like his successors, he’s got the proverbial looming “big account” (he’s an ad man) to enable his child-neglecting. And when we first see him, he’s staying late at the office. But he’s not working — at least not by the standards of the usual movie shorthand for “work.” Instead, he’s kicking back and telling some story about buying a Burberry coat, lazily postponing his nightly return to domestic life.

Like you’ve never done that.

Me Generation mess

Ted only starts paying attention to his kid because he has to. His wife, Joanna, has skipped town in classic 1970s fashion to “find” herself. In retrospect, she’s a terrible mom — the letter she sends Billy justifying her abandonment is pure cloying Me Generation psychobabble — but she’s Meryl Streep at age 30, and she’s breathtaking.

The movie opens with her in stunning close-up, lit like a Vermeer and gazing down at her half-asleep boy to say she loves him one last time. Never mind that she’s probably off to learn macramé and experiment with polyamory in a Santa Barbara “intentional community”; a few seconds basking in her otherworldly grace, and you want her for a mom too. Which just makes bumbling, selfish, all-too-human Ted’s attempts to start raising his kid seem that much more incompetent by comparison.

Improvised ugliness

Hoffman was going through his own divorce (with kids) at the time, and it shows. At least I don’t think you get a performance that subtle and true to life without drawing on personal experience. Ted’s anger toward Joanna is raw and ugly (Hoffman apparently improvised the hurled wineglass punctuating their first post-divorce meeting), but what’s really brave is the way Hoffman lets some of that anger leach into Ted’s relationship with his son.

Consider the aforementioned dinner-table scene. Even before the tension explodes, Ted can’t keep himself from cruelly imitating Billy’s whining — a moment as jarring (and completely relatable) as telling Billy he hates him. Or the scene where Billy spills juice all over Ted’s important papers. Billy is instantly and poignantly contrite, but Ted can’t stop ranting, and it’s only after Billy’s third or fourth forlorn “sorry” that he catches himself.

There’s little cuteness in Ted and Billy’s relationship — much credit should go to the excellent Henry as well as Hoffman — and the moments of levity and calm are hard-fought. As Ted does his best to become a more engaged father, Hoffman never lets us forget his character’s struggle to overcome his own selfishness.

‘No let-up’

We don’t get any singular, symbolic moment in which Ted finally vanquishes his petty adult concerns and really “gets” his kid, in which the dance recital defeats the big presentation once and for all. “Kramer vs. Kramer” understands that the task of parenting is in some ways fundamentally at odds with what society tells us is happy, functioning adulthood. That’s what makes it so hard — and so rewarding (sometimes): It’s a battle you have to fight every day.

In other words, “no let-up.” That’s “con” number five on the pros and cons list Ted draws up (at the advice of his lawyer) when deciding if he really wants custody. Cons one through four are “money,” “no privacy,” “work affected,” and “no social life”; there are no “pros.” In this day and age of extreme parenting, admitting such misgivings seems downright subversive.

The first morning of his new life as a reluctant single dad, Ted tries to make French toast for Billy. He gets shells in the egg, forgets the milk, and tries to fold the bread. He has no idea what he’s doing, and he’s also terrified.

But Ted does his best to hide it with a relentless stream of upbeat, almost hysterical patter: “You having a good time? We’re having a great time — I don’t remember the last time I had such a good time.” His mask doesn’t slip until he picks up a hot skillet and drops breakfast all over the floor. After a brief meltdown, he’s back to reassuring both of them that everyone’s going to be fine.

As a portrait of a “traditional” dad waking up to the new social realities of the 1970s, “Kramer vs. Kramer” is very much a movie of its time. That it still resonates today is in part thanks to good old-fashioned quality filmmaking.

But it’s also thanks to something universal that Hoffman finds in Ted. He’s a guy engaged in the moment-by-moment effort to put aside his own fear and selfishness in order to take care of someone else (which often just feels like attending to the other person’s fear and selfishness); to bluff that he’s fully at home in his authority, when in fact at any moment it could crush him. That could be in the general job description for being a parent. It’s not easy for a hotshot Manhattan ad exec caught up in the feminist revolution, but then, is it ever easy for anyone?