The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

Meryl Streep won her first Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, for Kramer vs. Kramer, a 1979 film in which she battled Dustin Hoffman onscreen and off. Hoffman and Streep’s conflict was an inverse of the Tandy/Brando rows during A Streetcar Named Desire. Now it was Hoffman, the Method actor, in the Tandy role, holding on to an old-fashioned way of working, while Streep played Brando, a natural genius rejecting everything the established star stood for. In Kramer, Hoffman and Streep played a divorcing couple warring over custody of their son. Prior to the action of the film, Hoffman’s Ted Kramer was neglectful and self-centered, taking his family for granted. His wife, Joanna, played by Streep, leaves him, and in her absence he must learn to accommodate, and then truly father, their son, Billy. Joanna is gone for much of the film. When she returns, she sets in motion the film’s final act by asking Ted to dinner and demanding custody of Billy. It’s a remarkable scene, one in which Joanna shows how far she has grown offscreen, while Ted, who reacts by throwing a glass against a wall in a restaurant and shattering it, shows how much farther he has to go. Hoffman’s glass throwing was improvised, and genuinely frightening, dusting Streep’s hair with fragments of broken glass. The incident is one of many times over the course of Kramer vs. Kramer when the actors’ contrasting styles led to on-set clashes. Like Ted, Hoffman needed to control the environment to get what he felt were...