Robert Benton

Films of Robert Benton:

• Bonnie and Clyde - Arthur Penn (1967) 
• Kramer vs. Kramer - Robert Benton (1979)

“Kramer vs. Kramer” - Robert Benton (1979)

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) is considered by many to be an outstanding courtroom drama, and indeed the American Film Institute has ranked the film as the 3rd greatest courtroom drama of all time [1].  But in my view the courtroom does not really lie at the heart of this film, and in fact the legal court procedures do not so much serve as an instrument of justice here, but are instead more an instrument in support of self-discovery.  And it is the subtlety and depth of this discovery, about what it means to love your own child, that makes this a memorable film. 

Certainly, for whatever reasons, the film, which was based on Avery Corman’s novel Kramer vs. Kramer (1977) and adapted for the screen by writer-director Robert Benton, was very well-received in all quarters.  It was a hit at the box office and received five Oscars – for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Best Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep), and Best Adapted Screenplay.  And it was nominated for four other Oscars – for Best Supporting Actor (Justin Henry), Best Supporting Actress (Jane Alexander), Best Cinematography (Néstor Almendros), and Best Film Editing (Gerald B. Greenberg).  Cinematographer Néstor Almendros, by the way, was already well-known in Europe for his excellent camera work for Francois Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Terence Malick, and it was he who recommended to the producers that Robert Benton, famous for having co-scripted Bonnie and Clyde (1967), be hired to direct Kramer vs. Kramer.

The story of Kramer vs. Kramer concerns and focalizes on a nuclear family in conflict, and one of the things that makes this story special is that all the sides of this conflict are shown with relatively equal sympathy [2].  These are real, complex people, and there are no obvious villains here.   The three family members are:

• Ted Kramer (played by Dustin Hoffman), an ambitious and hardworking art director for a New York advertising firm. 
   
• Joanna Kramer (played by Meryl Streep, in perhaps her first major film role) is Ted’s soft-spoken but frustrated housewife.
   
• Billy Kramer (Justin Henry) is the Kramers’ six-year-old son.

As we watch the story about Ted, Joanna, and Billy unfold, we can sympathize with them all and recognize a bit of ourselves in each of them.

The film begins with Joanna sadly kissing Billy goodnight and whispering to her sleepy son that she will always love him.  Then Ted comes home late from the office and excited that he has just been promoted by his firm to take over their biggest advertising account.  He is so preoccupied with this promotion that he barely hears her when she tells him she is leaving him and Billy.  We are given no backstory about what precipitated this shocking announcement, but we can guess.  Joanna, a Smith College alumna, feels neglected by her work-obsessed husband and seeks something more fulfilling in life than just being a stay-at-home housewife.

So right away Ted’s life is thrown into turmoil.  He will immediately have to take over all the parenting responsibilities for Billy while still attending to his overloaded work schedule.  With Joanna now out of the picture, the next hour of the film is devoted to covering the ill-prepared Ted’s assumption of his heretofore neglected fatherly duties.

We can see how much he had left parenting up to Joanna when we watch him hurriedly taking Billy to school and asking him along the way what grade he is in.  Ted also doesn’t know how to maintain an even disciplinary keel in the domestic household.  Sometimes he tries to be Billy’s buddy, as if the two of them are equals; while at other times he loses his temper when the young boy makes relatively innocent mistakes, like accidentally spilling a drink over Ted’s office papers.  Ted is clearly a well-meaning but novice parent, and he is shown making the kinds of mistakes that almost all novice parents tend to make.

But time passes, and over the succeeding months Ted begins little by little to show more patience and loving attention to Billy.  And these segments are the most heartwarming parts of the film, with outstandingly nuanced portrayals showing this coming together by Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry, as Ted and Billy.  One of the best sequences is the one showing Ted carefully and earnestly showing Billy how to ride a bicycle for the first time.  When Billy finally succeeds in cycling on his own without support, Ted is overjoyed. 

Along the way, Ted befriends his wife’s friend Margaret (Jane Alexander), who is also a single parent.  But there is no suggestion of a budding romantic attachment between these two.  They are merely sharing the joys parenthood with each other. One afternoon, though, while they are both watching their kids play in the park, Ted is horrified to see Billy fall from the park’s junglegym and sustain a serious head injury.  He immediately picks him up and runs frantically through the streets in order to get him to a hospital emergency room, where he lovingly caresses him while the doctor gives him emergency treatment.

Meanwhile all this increased devotion to parenting his son, including attending school functions and PTA meetings, is taking a toll on Ted’s demanding workload at the ad agency.  He finds himself arriving late to crucial meetings and generally disappointing his superiors.

Then another complication arises.  After fifteen months of absence, Joanna returns to New York and seeks custody of Billy.  She says she is now cured of her depression, has secured a high-paying job (one that even has a higher annual salary than Ted's), and wants to return to being Billy’s mother.  But Ted has changed during this time, too.  He has become a loving and devoted father, and he is unwilling to give up custody of Billy.  So the eponymous court proceedings are set in motion.

Ted’s fortunes receive another serious setback when he is suddenly fired from his job at the ad agency.  Knowing full well that he has no hope at all of holding onto custody of Billy if he is unemployed, Ted immediately launches an intense and desperate search for a new job, any job, even though it is now in the midst of the Christmas holiday season. 

The viewer’s sympathies may be pulled in different directions at this point.  We have been watching Ted transform into a truly loving father.  But Joanna seems sincerely devoted, too.  And Billy is overjoyed to see his mom again.  We presumably would like to see an outcome that is best for Billy, but what would that be?  We might think that Billy, still only seven years old, needs his mother.  But, after all, she already walked out on him once, and how do we know something like that won’t happen again?

The ensuing court case is arduous and full of acrimony, with intense cross-examinations, but it seems realistic to me.  During the proceedings both Ted and Joanna come to learn things about each other that they never knew during their eight years of marriage.  They come to see each other in a deeper and more appreciative light, and the way these revelations are brought about in court are another strong aspect of the film.

In the end the court magistrate goes along with conventional social attitudes that a young boy needs to be with his mother, and Ted loses the custody case.  Billy is to be handed over to Joanna.  But the film doesn’t end with that verdict, and when the handover is to take place, a more heartfelt arrangement is finally achieved.  No, the film doesn’t succumb to the sentimental notion of Ted and Joanna getting back together again, but it does wind up on a positive note that is likely to satisfy the viewer.
   

Kramer vs. Kramer is a story about love, but not one about romantic love.  The beauty that is shown here has nothing to do with the glamorous or the erotic.  What is explored here in this film is deep parental and filial love, and it is eloquently portrayed by all the principal performers in this film.  They were all nominated for Oscars (this may have been Dustin Hoffman’s most subtle performance), but, to me, one of the most astonishing performances was that of the young Justin Henry as Billy Kramer.  His emotive performance seemed utterly genuine.  How could such a young boy “know” (or be coached to show) how to act so well?
★★★½

Notes:

1. “AFI's 10 Top 10", Wikipedia, (9 December 2018).  
2. Roger Ebert, “Kramer vs. Kramer”, RogerEbert.com, (1 December 1979).   

“Samapti”, Stories by Rabindranath Tagore - Tani Basu (2015)

Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Samapti” (“The Conclusion”, 1893) is about an independent-minded girl’s resistance to an arranged marriage and her ensuing gradual coming to terms with connubial love.  This story served as the basis for “Samapti”, the 12th and 13th episodes of the anthology television series Stories by Rabindranath Tagore (2015), which was under the general directorship of Anurag Basu, with these two episodes having been directed by Tani Basu.  

Tagore’s stories are often about how love struggles within the constraints of a tradition-bound society, and “Samapti” is a good example.  This story was filmed years ago by Satyajit Ray as a substantial segment, “Samapti (The Conclusion)”, of his Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961), which was made to celebrate the centenary of Tagore’s birth.  Ray’s version, which is similar in length to the Basu version under review here and which I have earlier reviewed [1], is certainly an excellent rendition of this story, and I would think it would be very hard to match.  But the Basus’ version, which was scripted by Bijesh Jayarajan, has its own distinctive perspective and is very good, too.

One of the things I like about this version is the dreamlike rendering of the story that is evoked by cinematographer Bappa Mir’s extensive use of slow-motion photography.  This is aptly supplemented by the expressive soundtrack music from Anurag Saikia and Rana Mazumdar.  It is often the case that Film narratives have the character of dreams and vivid memories of the past that have a narrative structure with an emotional tone.  This film’s recurrent use of remembered images and slow-motion sequences emphasizes that emotive quality.

The story of “Samapti” proceeds through four approximate acts.

1.  Apoorva connects with Mrinmayi

The opening sequence of the story is actually shown at the tail end of Episode 11 of this series and shows a young man, Apoorva Chandrat Rai (played by Abhishek Tewari), returning from completing his college studies in Kolkata to his home village.  While walking near a river, he slips and falls down in the mud, heavily soiling his clothes.  His awkward mishap is observed with much mirthful delight by some young onlooking teenagers, the most mockingly derisive of whom is the only girl among them, Mrinmayi (Chitrangada Chakraborty).

When Apoorva arrives at his sumptuous family home, his widowed mother (Savita Prabhune) is overjoyed to see him, and she tells him it is now time for him to get married and that she has already arranged a perfect marriage match for him.  Knowing that her son has to return to Kolkata in a few weeks to take up law school studies,, she has already chosen an imminent “auspicious” day for his wedding.  Being a dutiful son, Apoorva, suppresses his misgivings over such rushed arrangements and agrees to meet the proposed bride, Krishna Ganguly, and her family the next day.

However, when he goes to visit the Ganguly family, he is dismayed to see how reticent and uninteresting the very young Krishna is.  Her passivity is further accentuated when the obstreperous mango thief, Mrinmayi, barges in demanding to play outside (i.e. steal more mangoes) with Krishna’s younger brother.  The contrast between the super-shy Krishna, and the exuberant tomboy, Mrinmayi, couldn’t be greater.  Then when Apoorva wants to return home, he finds that his shoes have been stolen.  Walking home in borrowed slippers, Apoorva is approached by the naughty Mrinmayi, who silently returns the shoes that she had stolen from him.  Before she can run away, though, he grabs her by the wrist, and they exchange a silent eye-to-eye interaction for several seconds.  This is one of those extended slow-motion elements that apparently signify a remembered moment in Apoorva’s life, and it comes up as one of the flash memory images when he is thinking about things later.

When Apoorva returns home, he informs his mother that he rejects Krishna as a marriage partner and instead wants to marry Mrinmayi (whose nickname we soon learn is “Meenu”).  His mother is disappointed that he has chosen such a roughhewn tomboy from a lower-level family, but she goes ahead and makes marriage arrangements with Meenu’s mother.  Meenu has always treasured her freedom and doesn’t want to get shackled into marital servility, but she is forced into accepting it.

2.  The Newlyweds

Meenu glumly submits to the ensuing traditional and sumptuous wedding, but as soon as it is over and she enters her new home, she tears off her wedding jewelry and runs away.  Apoorva finds her in the wild and coaxes her to return home.  But Meenu refuses to join him in the conjugal bed.   Apoorva is all accommodating and asserts to her that he married her because he liked her for who she is.  Meenu tartly responds by asking why it was that nobody asked her whom she likes?  And she coldly adds that she doesn’t like her new husband – “not even one bit”.

Meenu is now a sulking prisoner in Apoorva’s quarters, even though she still refuses to sleep with  him.  However, when Apoorva sees Meenu eagerly reading a warm letter from her father, who works in a remote city and who had been unable to get leave to attend his daughter’s wedding, he offers to take Meenu on a trip to visit  her father.  For the first time since her wedding, Meenu shows delight and smiles at her husband.

As we move to Episode 13 of the series, the two of them go to visit Meenu’s father for three days, where they sleep on the floor in the father’s tiny one-room apartment during their visit.  While there, Meenu for the first time has some cordial domestic interactions with her husband.

3.  A Separation
They return home, but Meenu still rejects the conjugal bed, and she won’t even let the gentle Apoorva kiss her.  So Apoorva, with the deadline approaching for the commencement of his legal studies in Kolkata, consents to leaving Meenu at her mother’s home.  When Meenu asks when she will see him again, he says he will come back to her when she writes to him and summons him. 

With Apoorva away, Meenu starts thinking of him more and missing his gentle ways.  When she hears that Apoorva’s mother is ill, she goes to attend to her.  Little by little, Meenu starts learning what it means to lovingly care for others, and she even starts learning how to cook from Apoorva’s mom.

Finally, Meenu writes a letter to her husband asking him to return to her.  But since she doesn’t know how to address the envelope (she just writes his name and “Kolkata” on it), we can assume he will never get the letter. 

Five months pass, and Meenu doesn’t hear anything from Apoorva.

4.  A Coming Together

Finally, after the five months of stasis, Apoorva’s mother decides to go visit her son in Kolkata, and with a knowing smile she offers to take Meenu along with her.  Meenu jumps at the chance.

When Meenu and Apoorva finally meet up, in Apoorva’s sister’s guest bedroom, there are two wounded egos waiting for the other’s explanation as to why they didn’t write.  Apoorva says he never received Meenu’s letter, and Meenu responds defensively by telling him that he is lying.  Apoorva then tells her that he has always loved her.  But Meenu, still clinging to her adolescent pride and sense of independence, insists again that she doesn’t love him.

But at this point Apoorva has come to know something that we viewers have also been starting to suspect.  He tells her calmly that she is the one who is lying, and he gently kisses her.  And Meenu ultimately accepts his embrace, and with it she comes to her final admission to herself of true love.

This Tagore story, as seen in both its cinematic realizations, reminds me, curiously, of My Fair Lady (1964).  The connection is that in both tales we see an autonomy-loving young woman struggling in the face of a well-meaning man who wants to reshape her in accordance with prevailing social customs.  And in both cases we have some sympathy for each of the contrasting perspectives and hope all along that a harmonious and romantic compromise can be achieved.  Which, of course, is what happens.

Note, however, that this version of Tagore’s “Samapti” has a slightly different feel from Ray’s.  In this instance, Meenu’s shift is not so radical as it is in Ray’s version and is very gradual.  This coloration of gradual acceptance and maturation has a subtlety to it that pulls the viewer in and makes this rendition of the story particularly appealing.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “‘Teen Kanya’ - Satyajit Ray (1961)”, The Film Sufi, (8 November 2017).   

“Requiem for the American Dream” - Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott (2015)

Requiem for the American Dream (2015) is a documentary film offering a summary of Noam Chomsky’s current thoughts on what he sees as the dysfunctional American sociopolitical landscape.  Chomsky, of course, is a preeminent American intellectual, famous for both (a) his revolutionary contributions to the academic field of linguistics and (b) his lifelong avocation as political activist and social critic.  Indeed Chomsky’s linguistics work, already attracting attention in the late 1950s, completely recast the field in accordance with his ideas.  Although these ideas have since come under criticism [1], he is probably still the most famous figure in this field in the last century.  However, Chomsky’s fame for the wider American public rests on his relentless activities as a social critic from a leftist liberal perspective.  It is on this plane of Chomsky’s thinking that Requiem for the American Dream is focused.  This film, which was co-directed, co-produced, and co-scripted by Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott, represents a summary compilation of Chomsky’s overall views on these matters.  And since Chomsky is now ninety-years-old, this may well be, as the filmmakers suggest, Chomsky’s final long-form testimony on American social issues.  In further observance of the solemnity of these perhaps final thoughts, they have also been published by Chomsky and the same filmmakers in 2017 in book form, entitled Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, and with much of the written text repeating verbatim Chomsky’s spoken words from the film [2,3].

When watching this film, it struck me that Chomsky and the filmmakers have been rather clever  in assembling a lot of disparate thoughts of Chomsky into a coherent structure.  The result is a relatively straightforward disquisition based on Chomsky’s “10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power”.  Chomsky’s basic idea is that the wealthy, self-interested elite in the United States have carefully conspired to undermine the basic, originally idealistic, principles of American society so that they can further concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the few.  Underlying this is the image of a malicious cycle of wealth bribing its way into more power, which leads to corrupt legislation that further enriches the wealthy. 

The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power that Chomsky lectures us on are as follows:

1.  Reduce Democracy
The basic goal of the wealthy elite here is to reduce democratic control over the economy and put it in the hands of a few “responsible” people.  Chomsky outlines examples of how this has been done over the years.

2.  Shape Ideology
There has always been concern among the elite about an “excess of democracy”.  So elitist leaders from both the Left and the Right have tried to influence our prevailing ideologies to correct this so-called flaw.  Chomsky specifically criticizes the Trilateral Commission as an organization with an elitist, anti-democratic agenda.

3.  Redesign the Economy

The movement to shift the economy from manufacturing (by off-shoring it) to financialization  has entailed a shift in perspective from long-term interests to short-term profits.  This Chomsky also sees as the outcome of a conspiracy.  In particular he cites economist and former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan’s, celebration of increasing job insecurity in the US.  Overall, redesign of the economy meant increasing deregulation and this led to more economic crashes.

4.  Shift the Burden
By reducing the progressive income tax, there was a dramatic increase in inequality.  This led to a shift in the burden of funding the government from the “plutonomy” to the “precariat “.

5.  Attack Solidarity
The goal here has been to attack social cohesion and instead extol self-interest [3].  Instruments along these lines have been both the increased  privatization of the public commons and the undermining of social security and public-funded education.

6.  Run the Regulators
There has been a huge increase in wealth-funded lobbying that has interfered with the proper public regulation of the economy [4].  Now it seems that with every economic bubble/crash, there is a bailout that redistributes wealth to the rich and increases inequality.  Big business has come to expect and count on crash bailouts from the government.

7.  Engineer Elections
Chomsky feels that the concentration of wealth inevitably leads to the concentration of political power.  He is particularly critical of the 2010 US Supreme Court decision “Citizens United”, which, by declaring that corporations have the same rights as individual citizens, gave them enormous power to influence and manipulate elections.

8.  Keep the Rabble in Line
In order to undermine social cohesion, the elites have long attacked organized labor.  Now only  7% of private-sector jobs are unionized.

9.  Manufacture Consent
There has long been a drive to get people to over-consume via false advertising.  The advertising media lie to the people in order to get them to waste their money.  Now these same techniques are being used to get an uninformed electorate to make irrational choices.  Given the economic decline of print media and the increased concentration of network media, the only people with the resources to run information media for the public are the wealthy elite, who are willing to run these media at a loss in order to achieve their political aims [5].  Again, the concentration of wealth leads to a decline in democratic openness.        

10.  Marginalize the Population
Of course, the goal of the elite is to keep major decision-making from the hands of the people.  One means to this end is to keep the public mired in unfocussed anger and outside of the main decision-making processes.

All along the way of this discourse,  Chomsky speaks in calm, measured terms.  It is clear that he has thought things over very carefully.  However, sometimes he makes, for me, surprising observations.  For example, he points out that Richard Nixon was the last “New Deal” American President [3]:

“In Nixon’s administration, you get the consumer safety legislation (CPSC), safety and health regulations in the workplace (OSHA) and the EPA — the Environmental Protection Agency. Business didn’t like it, of course — they didn’t like the higher taxes, didn’t like the regulation.”

Another interesting observation of Chomsky’s was his claim that freedom of speech is not in the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights.  However, First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights reads

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

And this, to me, contradicts Chomsky’s claim.  Nevertheless, Chomsky’s thoughts on freedom of speech are well developed [6], and he does positively celebrate the fact that, thanks to seminal Supreme Court decisions mostly in the 1960s, no other country’s citizens enjoy the freedom-of-speech protections that American citizens do.

But the overall vision that Chomsky puts forward is certainly bleak.  In particular he doesn’t offer a positive program or set of principles that we should all fight for.  In this connection, I would suggest that his advocacy could be fruitfully supplemented by consideration of the four core principles that I believe underlie successful rational humanist societies and which I call RMDL [7].  The four essential RMDL principles, which must operate in concert, are:

• Human Rights.  These include freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom to watch and listen, freedom from torture, etc.
   
• Open Markets.  There needs to be regulated markets that allow for the open exchange of goods and services across society.  This includes necessarily ensuring there is sufficient wealth equity across society so that there can be widespread, fair exchange.
   
• Democracy.  Some form of democracy involving universally inclusive enfranchisement needs to be in place.
   
• Rule of Law.  There needs to be a written set of laws that are made known to everyone and that can be changed or adjusted by the actions of a democratically-elected government.

With RMDL in mind, we all need to set about positively rectifying and saving the American Dream [8].
★★★½

Notes:

1. “Universal Grammar, Criticisms”, Wikipedia, (7 August 2018). 
2. “Requiem for the American Dream (book)”, Wikipedia, (9 October 2018).   
3. Mark Lilla, “Two Roads for the New French Right”, The New York Review of Books, (20 December 2018).  
4. Noam Chomsky, “In His New Book, Noam Chomsky Takes a Look at Income Inequality”, Moyers, (11 May 2017).  
5. Erik Wemple, “The Weekly Standard is gone”, The Washington Post, (14 December 2018).   
6. Noam Chomsky, “Crimes Again / Freedom of Speech”, Arts & Opinion, Vol. 10, No. 3, (2011).  
7. See my discussions of RMDL, which can be accessed by clicking on the tag  “RMDL” under the “LABELS” section of this site.   
8. David Swanson, “Noam Chomsky Wants You to Wake Up From the American Dream”, Alternet, (27 February 2016).   

Jared P. Scott

Films of Jared P. Scott:

• Requiem for the American Dream - Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott (2015)