Kramer vs. Kramer: Weirdest Seinfeld episode ever.

I was watching some DVD extras, and Dustin Hoffman said, in an interview, that he became interested in doing the film because he had recently gone through a divorce, and he said he felt extremely raw about it. The idea that you--yourself--would actually do that. Get to a point in your marriage when you would be forced to undue everyting you took great effort to do at your wedding. That, somehow, as one goes through their life, they slowly learn, agian and again, that they must do things they never thought would be necessary. We learn that life is about compromise.

That concept, in an admittedly vague way, floats about in Kramer vs. Kramer (a Freddy vs. Jason prequal, I'm pretty sure). The "villain" character, played by Glenn Close (the titular "Kramer"), is never un-relatable, and even in her standard-female-craziness (it's science, look it up) we can understand what she's going through. Or, least, that she's going through something big, and we kind of forgive her. Of course Hoffman (the titular "Kramer") is the character with whom we actually connect, and it's really heart-warming watching him return from his obsesison with work, back to his family. He does what many of us would never do: accepts that what we see as important in life should maybe come second, and what he have taken for granted needs to be first. That's a strong statement to follow through, that a person always has the ability to snap back to what they love--what they need--no matter how deep their head may have been up their ass. The long tracking shot of Hoffman running his son to the hospital says it all: we will reach for extremes when we truly love. That's an amazing thing to witness, and, as a human being, be a part of. It's the inverse of Borges' "The Shape of the Sword".

Then, though, that redemption gets tested (the titular "vs."), and against a self-important ex-wife, and a judicial system streamlined to favor mothers, the father makes a stand, and the son (who is curiously absent from the title) can stay in his safe little world. Sometimes the happy ending isn't necessarily the lame-ass cheesy one.