‘Kramer vs. Kramer’
This 1979 multi-Oscar winner--it won for Best Picture, Actor, Director, Screenplay, and Supporting Actress--was one of the first of the touchy-feely Sensitive Guy movies. Dustin Hoffman drew on a thick fund of sympathy playing a single father, and Meryl Streep, as his ex-wife, became the villain of the piece. 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. Writer-director Robert Benton is as adept at pushing our buttons, in his own “tasteful” way, as Spielberg in “Jaws” (MAX Wednesday at 4:30 p.m.).
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