1979's Kramer vs. Kramer wins Best Picture but barely holds up for me

 

It's important, I think, to start here: I don't really care for Dustin Hoffmann as an actor. I've always found him to come off as insincere, as if the moving parts of his acting performance are showing rather than allowing me to believe in his character. The one exception is when he played Hook for Spielberg and, funnily enough, his performance is the only thing that I really like from that movie.

The point of Kramer vs. Kramer is essentially that men can be loving parents, too. I suppose that's a fine statement to make, and I wish I could watch this through the lens of living in 1979 when this was perhaps a bolder claim, but there's a real ankle weight that drags the movie down: Ted isn't all that likeable, and I believe that goes beyond my thing with Hoffmann. 

Even as he goes on his journey to become the best father he can be, he's still selfish and explosively angry right until the end. I understand that presenting a character with flaws makes for a more interesting story, but I don't believe that the movie is trying to present him as a complicated figure when he smashes a wine glass against the wall moments after the above image with Streep - I think the movie wants us to take his side in that moment. 

His burgeoning friendship with his neighbour Margaret has a bizarre feel to it, as he goes rather quickly from haranguing her about her hand in the dissolution of his own marriage to wrapping his arm around her, kissing her casually on the forehead, and tapping her backside while telling her what a good mother he is. That's weird, right? In tandem with his kissing of a random (soon-to-be) co-worker at an office party, the dude's creepy.

And let's call this what it is: what kind of person, no matter how work-obsessed, wife-suppressing, child-distancing they may be, thinks that you mix French toast in a coffee mug and is then shocked when the bread doesn't fit? 

At first I was surprised that Hoffmann's name came before the credits and Streep's afterwards, but it's been so long since I've seen this that I forgot how little she's actually in the movie (although her impact is tremendous). It hasn't been so long, though, that I forgot about Hoffmann running like Tom Cruise through the streets of New York with his son in his arms - that moment has stuck with me since whenever I watched this (roughly forty years ago).