Stanley Kauffmann

“…. The drawing of the characters is adequate, possibly excepting the wife who is off screen a good deal of teh time. Her inner crisis, which is why she leaves, and her recovery are more matters of report than enactment. All the people go through expected difficulties the way that runners take the hurdles in a track event: no surprise in it, it's just a question of how they do it. The anatomy and engagement of the script are those of a television drama bellying up to reality.

“But the actors make it more. It's an old plaint of critics that good actors do much of the writing for lesser authors, fleshing out characters that have only been sketched. That's not quite the case here. As written, Benton's characters are clear enough but are a set of samples. The actors provide the dimensions of travail and grief, and of humor, that turn commonplace incidents of fictions into unique yet representative experiences….

“To continue the old-star comparison: Meryl Streep, the wife, is today's Bette Davis, or could be if there were now an equivalent film industry. Streep is first an actress, a much less mannered and self-centered actress than Davis but with Davis's qualities of unconventional beauty and of reliance on acting as much as on starriness--the woman star who really acts and does it in different roles. Think of Streep as the airy southern rich lawyer in The Seduction of Joe Tynan and as the supermarket worker in The Deer Hunter, sitting in the stock room stamping prices on items and crying softly. Age allowing, Davis could have done things like that.

“But I vastly prefer Streep. In Kramer she plays a somewhat neurotic woman whose dissatisfaction with marriage drives her out, leaving her son, ten minutes into the film and who returns--about a film-hour later, I'd guess--when she has herself in hand and wants to reclaim her son. Obviously the brief appearance at the beginning had to be strong enough to make her a continuing presence and to give her a foothold after she returns. Streep handles this difficulty easily, by concentrating on the truth of the woman and by having the talent for that concentration. I've been waiting for some years now--nastily, I guess--for Streep to make a false move on stage or screen in widely varied characters. I'm still waiting. So much for nastiness.”

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, December 22, 1979

(Kael and Sarris would soon suggest a “nastiness" of a different nature.)