I watched Kramer vs. Kramer after a suggestion by Welmer a few days ago. The wife, played by Meryl Streep when she was decent looking, abandons her husband, played by Dustin Hoffman, and their child. Eighteen months later she returns, infused by feminist counseling, to steal their child away from the father who has worked so hard to maintain employment while raising his son alone. A classic example of woman’s lack of guilt to which Paul Elam spoke the other day.
The problem I have with this movie is that – SPOILER ALERT – at the end of the movie, after she has won custody through the biased family courts, she suddenly realizes it would be cruel to her son to take him away from his home and decides she will let the father keep custody. What? THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN.
The film won five Oscars and boasted stars to attract people to the box office, so people obviously paid attention to it (though I, a young lad, had never heard of it until Welmer mentioned it). Maybe if Kramer vs. Kramer had ended honestly, with the mother taking her child away and nailing the father for child support, more people would have realized two truths:
1) The family court system is heavily biased against the father.
2) Women don’t have a conscience.
I’m exaggerating on the second point but in a lot of cases it’s absolutely true, as women are generally ruled by their own selfish desires.
The media’s painting of all women as moral and virtuous is part of the reason men still get the shaft. Even though Kramer vs. Kramer went astray in the last few minutes, it is well worth watching to gain an appreciation of the struggles of fatherhood and the ills of family court.
