Linear

Kramer vs. Kramer's narrative plays it straight. We jump into the story just as Joanna's getting ready to hit the road. The story charges on in a straightforward, linear fashion until the very end: no flashbacks or forwards, no huge time jumps. Any backstory—anything that happened before Joanna kisses Billy goodbye—only surfaces through exposition, like in court when Joanna mentions that she had a job before she was married.

Time passes steadily, and that, too, is marked by exposition or by holidays. On the witness stand, Joanna mentions that she was away for 18 months, for example, and we get a glimpse at Billy's Halloween pageant and a brief scene at the kitchen table where Ted and Billy are making Christmas decorations. Seasons change; everybody wears a lot of utilitarian 1970s winter outerwear.

The narrative in Kramer vs. Kramer is so straightforward that they shot they movie in sequence, too—something film productions almost never do. That means they shot the scenes in the same order that they occur in the finished film. Care to hazard a guess why they shot all the scenes in chronological order?

If you guessed "because one of the stars was a 7-year-old who had never acted before," give yourself a juice box and some stale graham crackers. Justin Henry (Billy) was only told what was happening in the scene they were shooting that same day so that he could "experience it instead of acting it." All of the direction came through Dustin Hoffman (Ted), too, so that he and Henry could bond (source).

Shooting in sequence paid off; Henry nabbed an Oscar nod for his performance and remains the youngest person ever nominated in any category. Not that he had any huge competition outside the acting categories; we mean, we're willing to bet there aren't any 5-year-old sound effects editors working nights and dreaming of their first Academy Award.