In 1978, seven-year-old Justin Henry lived in the right house. His neighbor was a casting director and helped Justin land the role of Billy Kramer in this week’s Best Picture winner, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979, Stanley Jaffe Productions; Columbia). Justin had no prior acting experience, but became the youngest person to ever be nominated for an Academy Award in any category when he received a Best Supporting Actor nod for his role as the child of a workaholic father and a mother who leaves him to pursue something more “interesting” for herself. In addition to Justin’s nomination, Kramer vs. Kramer was tapped for eight other Oscars and won five, narrowly missing becoming a “Big Five” winner. The film won for Writing (Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium), Directing for Robert Benton, Actress in a Supporting Role for Meryl Streep as Joanna Kramer, Actor for Dustin Hoffman as Ted Kramer, and Best Picture. It failed to win for Cinematography, Film Editing, Actress in a Supporting Role for Jane Alexander as Margaret Phelps, and (again) Actor in a Supporting Role for Justin Henry as Billy Kramer.

The pre-divorce Kramers: Ted, Billy, and Joanna.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a short film (based on Avery Corman’s best-selling 1977 novel of the same name), but it tells a good story that is all too familiar to a lot of people—a story about a failed marriage and the tug-of-war the couple engages in over their devastated child. For Dustin Hoffman, the story hit close to home when he joined the project in the late 1970s. Hoffman was himself going through a divorce and at first didn’t like the film’s script. He told director Robert Benton and producer Stanley Jaffe that he was reluctant to join the team because the “script has no feeling of what I’m going through.” When Benton asked what would change his mind about doing the movie, Hoffman told him that they would need to shut themselves in a room for three months and rewrite the script—which is exactly what they did. Although Hoffman played a big role in the script’s revision, he turned down a writing credit for Kramer vs. Kramer, a decision he later thought unwise. But, the experience of working through his own emotional turmoil was “liberating,” says Hoffman, because it allowed him to “push all the stuff I was going through out there.” Young Justin Henry could also relate to the film’s subject matter. In a 2012 interview, Hoffman explained, “I later discovered [Justin] was coming from a home that was breaking up. There was a moment during a break in the testing when I thought, this is the right kid, he’s my son.” Meryl Streep likewise was going through a painful time in her life, following the recent death of her lover, John Cazale (you know, Fredo from The Godfather…). The result of Kramer vs. Kramer’s three main actors’ personal trials is a film that doesn’t feel contrived in any way. It is simple, to the point, and very realistic (unfortunately).

The post-divorce Kramers.

Divorce and conflicts over custody are just a couple of the tough issues we’ve seen in the films of the 1970s. This decade has presented us with war, espionage, drug trafficking, murder, organized crime, gambling, cons, mental illness, institutional corruption, poverty, rampant sexuality, and PTSD—and that’s just naming a few topics in these films. So as we leave the 1970s this week, I find it interesting to think back and observe the differences between the previous decade of the 1960s with its “golden age” of musicals and that of the 1970s with its unapologetic glimpses into raw humanity. Personally, I’ll take the musicals over most of this darker material any time, but I think it is also good for me (and us) to be exposed to the content of times that have preceded our own in order to better understand how we have gotten to where we are today—culturally, socially, psychologically, spiritually, etc. In a decade that began with a larger-than-life man in a world-consuming war, we close these times with a look at the intimate struggles of one particular family—the decade itself moving us from a “macro” world to a “micro” one, always insisting on the importance of the individual, yet more than ever revealing how the problems of a tense world evolve out of the tensions of personal relationships and the stability (or lack thereof) of the family unit. The real tragedy of the films of the 1970s is that the decade itself was very much like those films—restless, violent, and sometimes hopeless. Maybe, though, the ending of Kramer vs. Kramer can provide a bit of hope for the upcoming 1980s—but that’s a post for a bit later.

For more thoughts on Kramer vs. Kramer and its significance, please check out the full post this weekend!