This film explores the story of Joanna trying to get away from everyone by getting a new life and finding herself leaving her son and husband Ted Kramer. Ted is trying to cope with this state of separation and provokes his son to become familiar with the current situation, but there is difficulty. In the end, things turn out where return seems to be the natural course that changes the course of everything.
Benton's Oscar-winning film, a middlebrow family melodrama, well acted by Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, reflected the new positions and struggles of women in American society.
What Benton achieved with his screenplay he intensified with his direction. Each performance is a minor miracle of perfection - not only Hoffman's and Streep's, which dominate the picture, but each of the supporting roles as well.
Like a few other recent movies, it takes a serious look at problems faced in real people in real life -- family conflicts, personality problems, childrearing dilemmas.
It's an interesting movie to look back on for its attitudes: In the guise of being a consciousness-raiser it plumps for male tenderness and demonizes the mother who can't recognize how far her workaholic ex-hubbie has come.
There is so seldom even one great performance in a movie that three is too much to expect. For that reason alone, this story of a couple battling for custody of their young son is a remarkable achievement.
Washington Post
May 06, 2017
A triumph of partisan pathos, a celebration of father-son bonding that astutely succeeds were tearjerkers like "The Champ" so mawkishly failed.
