"Kramer v. Kramer" v. "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

HOLY SHIT THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST BRACKET OF THE SWEET SIXTEEN AND IT IS ALREADY SO DIFFICULT. How am I supposed to pick between these two extraordinary performances?? 

Tbh, I am still salty about the fact that I paired "Kramer v. Kramer" against "Deer Hunter," which is easily in my top 5 favorite films from the entire bracket. When it came down to the wire, I felt I had to go with the movie that gave us more Meryl screen time: and ultimately, those few extra scenes in "Kramer" are what edged "Deer Hunter" out. 

"Kramer" was actually on the short list of Meryl movies I'd already seen, and remains one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE performances from her ever. She is able to take a somewhat villainous character: a mother who abandons her child for AN ENTIRE YEAR, and then fights like hell to get FULL CUSTODY - and somehow is able to make us feel enormous sympathy for her. She is vulnerable and honest and authentic AF, and you actually come to feel very strongly that she did the RIGHT thing leaving her kid, because she was miserable and genuinely at risk of a mental breakdown (or worse). The court scenes where she has to literally defend herself in front of a judge are HARROWING. This is pure, unadulterated Meryl: no accents, no wigs, no prosthetics, just a bare-faced, young, hurting woman doing her goddamned BEST. Frankly, it's my favorite kind of Meryl. There's a reason she won her first Oscar for it. 
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​There is a phenomenal Vanity Fair article about young Meryl and her journey towards "Kramer" that, if you've made it this far in #MerylMadness, is absolutely worth the read (excerpt below).

"How Meryl Streep Battled Dustin Hoffman, Retooled Her Role, and Won Her First Oscar"
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"Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be “an ogre, a princess, an ass,” as she put it soon after to American Film. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody. When she gives up Billy in the final scene, it should be for the boy’s sake, not hers. Joanna isn’t a villain; she’s a reflection of a real struggle that women are going through across the country, and the audience should feel some sympathy for her. If they wanted Meryl, they’d need to do re-writes, she later told Ms. magazine.

​The trio was taken aback, mostly because they hadn’t called her in for Joanna in the first place. They were thinking of her for the minor role of Phyllis, the one-night stand. Somehow she’d gotten the wrong message. Still, she seemed to understand the character instinctively. Maybe this was their Joanna after all?

That, at least, was Meryl’s version. The story the men told was completely different. “It was, for all intents and purposes, the worst meeting anybody ever had with anybody,” Benton recalled.
“She said a few things, not much. And she just listened. She was polite and nice, but it was—she was just barely there.”

When Meryl left the room, Stanley Jaffe was dumbfounded. “What is her name—Merle?” he said, thinking box office.

Benton turned to Dustin. Dustin turned to Benton. “That’s Joanna,” Dustin said. The reason was John Cazale. Dustin knew that Meryl had lost him only months earlier, and from what he saw, she was still shaken to the core. That’s what would fix the Joanna problem: an actress who could draw on a still-fresh pain, who was herself in the thick of emotional turmoil. It was Meryl’s weakness, not her strength, that convinced him."
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You should also give that Vanity Fair article a read because it describes just how HARROWING the filming process was for the cast and crew - because of Dustin Hoffman. I had always been a fan of his work (The Graduate is one of my favorites), and over the years I'd heard a few rumors of his - shall we say, sub-optimal behavior, but I always assumed it was just the somewhat self-indulgent behavior of a method actor, benefiting from his white male privilege. IT WAS SO MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. 

At different points during filming, Hoffman taunted her about Cazale's death, told the child actor that he'd never see any of his friends ever again to make him cry, and slapped Meryl Streep in the face JUST TO NAME A FEW. He took it upon himself to go to whatever means HE saw "necessary" to procure the "best" performances from his co-stars, and whenever Meryl fought to make Joanna the well-rounded, sympathetic, human character that we see in the film today, he attacked her every step of the way. 

"Dustin and Meryl took their positions on the other side of the apartment door. Then something happened that shocked not just Meryl but everyone on set. Right before their entrance, Dustin slapped her hard across the cheek, leaving a red mark.

Benton heard the slap and saw Meryl charge into the hallway. We’re dead, he thought. The picture’s dead. She’s going to bring us up with the Screen Actors Guild. Instead, Meryl went on and acted the scene. Clutching Joanna’s trench coat, she pleaded with Ted, “Don’t make me go in there!” As far as she was concerned, she could conjure Joanna’s distress without taking a smack to the face, but Dustin had taken extra measures. And he wasn’t done.

In her last tearful moments, Joanna tells Ted that she doesn’t love him anymore, and that she’s not taking Billy with her. The cameras were set up on Meryl in the elevator, with Dustin acting his part offscreen.

Improvising his lines, Dustin delivered a slap of a different sort: outside the elevator, he started taunting Meryl about John Cazale, jabbing her with remarks about his cancer and his death. “He was goading her and provoking her,” Fischoff recalled, “using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance.”

Meryl, Fischoff said, went “absolutely white.” She had done her work and thought through the part. And if Dustin wanted to use Method techniques like emotional recall, he should use them on himself. Not her.

They wrapped, and Meryl left the studio in a rage. Day two, and Kramer vs. Kramer was already turning into Streep vs. Hoffman."
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Oh yeah, and remember that ICONIC glass-smashing scene in the restaurant? Yeah, he NEVER FUCKING TOLD HER HE WAS GONNA DO THAT.

"In the next take, Dustin smacked the wineglass and it shattered on the restaurant wall. Meryl jumped in her chair, authentically startled. “Next time you do that, I’d appreciate you letting me know,” she said. There were shards of glass in her hair. The camera caught the whole thing. [...]
“I never saw one moment of emotion leak out of her except in performance,” Benton said. She thought of the movie as work, not as a psychological minefield.
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I'd like to go on a Very Quick Rant now about
"​THE METHOD ACTOR."

​As a young and impressionable actor in ~theatre school~ I thought The Method was THE ONLY WAY to be a True Actor. I worshipped at the altar of Daniel Day-Lewis, and had a deep and ardent infatuation with Gary Oldman. It wasn't ~aaaaart~ unless it almost KILLED YOU.​

Then I read a few books on acting. One of them had a chapter on the differences between American and British approaches to The Method, including an anecdote about the shooting for the film "Marathon Man." In it, Hoffman had a scene where his character had been awake for three nights in a row.  When his co-star Sir Laurence Olivier asked how he prepared, Hoffman admitted that he himself hadn’t slept for the last 72 hours. “My dear boy,” Olivier retorted, “Why don’t you just try acting?” 

That was the FIRST TIME it occurred to me that there *might* be a problem with The Method. The more research I did, the more I began to see fault in great and flawless method.

Think of all the notorious Method actors you know of... what do they all have in common?

OH WEIRD, THEY ARE ALL WHITE MEN.

MAYBE BECAUSE A WHITE MAN IS THE ONLY PERSON WHO COULD GET AWAY WITH ACTING LIKE A FUCKING IDIOT ON SET.

During the filming of "My Left Foot," Daniel Day-Lewis stayed in character as a man with cerebral palsy during the ENTIRETY of the film shoot: meaning crew members had to carry him in his wheelchair up and down stairs, over wire and cable cords, and someone had to HAND FEED HIM HIS LUNCH. I'm sorry, but a woman or POC could NEVER FUCKING GET AWAY WITH THAT ABSURD BEHAVIOR. For Christ's sake, women can't even make it through production without getting harassed, sexually or otherwise - and so many POC can't even get HIRED on a set in the first place. When it's done the way these boys are known for doing it, The Method is self-indulgent and selfish.

I believe strongly in dedication and sacrificing to your craft. It takes commitment and emotional endurance. But my god boy, have you ever tried just acting?! A good craftsman's method, whatever it may be, should never INTERFERE with the crew or the other members of the cast.  #FuckTheMethod 

...I am now going to contradict myself just *ever* so slightly.

Although I believe Method Acting is ultimately lazy, selfish, and destructive, I also feel it is pertinent to note that while filming "Kramer," Meryl WAS NOT YET A MOTHER.

Even though you should not have to BE a mother to PLAY a mother, there is something just - different - about what The Method demands when it comes to something as personal as motherhood. I would be just as impressed to see an actor perform a romantic role and then discover that they'd never actually been in love. For what the role of Joanna required, knowing this makes me all the more impressed with Meryl's performance. 

SO HOW THE HELL DO I COMPARE THIS TO "FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN"?? Arguably, Meryl does "more things" in "French Lieutenant," but does she not go deeper in "Kramer"? According to this Guardian article, Meryl even confessed that she didn't feel "French Lieutenant" was her best work, citing that the structure of the movie - playing both the actress and the character - made it difficult to really "live it."

She may not have thought her performance was believable, but I sure as hell did. I totally believed her as brave town harlot, I believed her as the broken women desperate to make amends, I believed her as the magical temptress finally coming into her own, and I was as shocked as Jeremy Irons when we all learned that she'd been pretending to be all those things.

​Then I believed her as the innocently malicious home-wrecker, as the girl coming into womanhood, realizing she'd made a terribly selfish mistake and doing whatever she could to right her wrongs. As we switched back and forth, I believed her as the secretive and emotionally guarded actress, and I believed her when she looks Jeremy's wife in the eyes and tells her how jealous she is of her life. I believed what Meryl believed: that the love she shared with Jeremy was not going to end the way it does in the book/movie, that it was only ever going to be temporary, and that she could learn to live with that. 

The internal struggle in "Kramer" is between doing what's best for Meryl and what's best for her son, and she ultimately chooses the right thing. In "French Lieutenant," the battle is not dissimilar: do what is best for Meryl, or do what is right. It is somewhat fractured - intentionally, poetically so - because her "character" chooses the more selfish thing, but Real Meryl chooses the right thing.

​If these movies were paintings, "French Lieutenant" would be a massive, 10' x 10' masterpiece with ten subplots and a hundred characters, and every emotion under the sun; "Kramer" is a smaller, seemingly more simple portrait: wildly detailed, exceptionally textured, the pain of the artist visible in every stroke.

​If "French Lieutenant" is a Raphael, then "Kramer" is a Van Gogh. 

Full disclosure, I thought I knew my answer after watching both movies, but IN THE PROCESS OF WRITING THIS I HAVE CHANGED MY OWN DAMN MIND. Maybe it was that Vanity Fair article, maybe it was (unfairly?) learning about the context of production, maybe it's a matter of opinion, and maybe I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT BECAUSE IT'S MY FUCKING BRACKET. 

​...Van Gogh for the win. #1 in the GREAT EIGHT:

​"KRAMER V. KRAMER"

Oh yeah side bar: I'm not fucking calling it "the elite eight," it's a goddamn mouthful and I hate it. 

I DON'T CARE IF IT RUINS THE ALLITERATION, "THE GREAT EIGHT" SOUNDS BETTER AND YOU CANNOT CHANGE MY MIND.

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