Your Character Has Depth. He Has an Arc. Who Cares? Creating Emotional Impact with Your Writing

So you've finished your step outline or your draft and your protagonist has gone from hero to heel or schlub to mensch. It's an interesting journey to be sure, with highs and lows but that payoff you're looking for, commonly called the catharsis, is nowhere to be seen. You want to pull at your audience's heart strings, but you want to do it without using trickery--like killing a child or pretending to kill a child. What do you do?

You turn to the classics, that's what. And today we'll be turning to the scribe responsible for such classics as Bonnie and Clyde and Superman--Robert Benton. We will be focusing, however, on his 1979 drama, Kramer Vs. Kramer, which follows Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) a self-absorbed, success-obsessed adman who is thrown for a loop when his wife (sympathetically played by Meryl Streep) walks out on him and their young child.

It doesn't take a film buff to figure out where this is going: through trials and tribulations absentee father, Ted is going to become the dad he never knew he could be, but not without great personal and professional sacrifice. Benton does well to throw in a plot twist (SPOILER ALERT) by having the wayward guardian return and demand what's “rightfully” hers. Ted fights it in the courts, but he is lacking the maternal instincts considered necessary to rear a child. All compelling and emotional stuff, but we haven't had our cathartic release; we're talking about the one that comes in the denouement--or in this case right before it.

And this is where Benton's true genius shines, he uses an age old method called the Bookend, placing two scenes or sequences at opposite ends of a screenplay to reinforce a theme or create an emotional impact. Let's examine the scenes.

The first one occurs around the 1^st act turning point, just after Billy (the son played by Justin Henry) has awakened to discover his mother has flown the coupe. Ted decides to make French Toast for his son. (I've used a clip here, since the sequence is so long on the page).

Making French Toast




Kramer vs. Kramer

— MOVIECLIPS.com

The second scene, which we'll experience on the page, occurs right before Ted is to turn over custody of Billy to Joanna (the Denouement).

INT. KRAMER KITCHEN - MORNING

ON TED AND BILLY

They stand side by side, like a surgeon and his assistant. Spread out on the counter in front of them are the makings of French Toast. The following is done with great efficiency, in contrast to the first time we go through this ritual. They work in silence except for an occasional command. Each concentrating on this last moment of closeness, each doing his best to avoid thinking about Billy's departure. Finally:

ON BILLY

Looking at his father, trying to memorize the older man's face.

Ted turns, sees his son watching him.

                                     TED
                          (with false gaiety)
                     Hey? What's doin' with that bread? 
                     Let's see a little hustle around 
                     here.

After the second scene you realize that Ted truly has changed but so has Billy. They've become a team, a well oiled mechanism. If only the courts could see. And now he has to give him up. There you have it, Benton strikes a chord with his audience and it resonates, causing that coveted catharsis.

If you want to see how the scenes appear on the page--and you should, Benton captures the moods perfectly with his words and after all this is a screenwriting blog--follow the link: Kramer Vs. Kramer

~ Danniel Dean