Indeed, it’s pretty tough to imagine what a modern movie version of “Kramer vs. Kramer” might look like. For starters, Joanna’s feminist quest to leave her 5-year-old behind and “find herself” would be foreshortened quickly by a mob of pious superparents stoning her to death. But then, Joanna would never dash off to the Left Coast seeking individual therapy in the first place. Instead, she and Ted would enter into years of couples’ therapy resembling the tedious purgatory of the HBO drama “Tell Me You Love Me.” That show, by the way, never caught on with audiences, in no small part because it couldn’t even muster the wit and compassion of “Kramer vs. Kramer,” instead offering a succession of awkward, stuttered exchanges between surly couples. This is our take on divorce, circa 2011: either the sunny release of “Happily Divorced” or the grim hell of “Tell Me You Love Me” or “Louie.”

If the Kramers in our modern remake did eventually split, the divorce would be little more than an anticlimax, after which Joanna hires a life coach, rediscovers meditation, joins Match.com and has her no-fault documentation under way on LegalZoom within a few hours. Ted, meanwhile, hires a phalanx of nannies to escort an unfazed Billy from one after-school activity to the next. Finally, the couple calmly sifts through their assets with the help of an encouraging mediator. The moral to this modern divorce story? If everyone involved doesn’t emerge stronger, happier and more productive, well, then, in the vague parlance of today’s progressive preschool, someone is making bad choices.

The notion that there’s some “right” choice for every life challenge fits neatly into the control-freak mind-set of our current moment. We’ve developed a real talent for transforming neutral or negative events into triumphant rites of passage. This may represent Oprah’s most enduring legacy: the relentless conviction that even the most unpredictable, unmanageable problems can be stuffed into the familiar packaging of “catharsis.” Rather than acknowledging residual pain or lingering trauma, we’re urged to embrace each story as a wake-up call or a breakthrough on the road to self-fulfillment.

No wonder we have so little tolerance for slow recoveries. We long for images of Gabrielle Giffords once again delivering eloquent speeches or Maria Shriver hugging and crying with her husband’s baby-mama, as if all were forgiven seconds after she heard her housekeeper’s confession. “I’m regaining my power,” Kelsey Grammer’s ex-wife, Camille, recently proclaimed, manifesting the willfully expansive stance favored by today’s public figures. Infidelity, a love child (or two), dalliances with prostitutes, lewd online behavior; we’ve watched so many spouses bounce back from hell that maybe we’re beginning to believe that there’s no trauma so great that it can’t be quickly metabolized into a courageous determination to sally forth against the storm. Stories of divorced couples peacefully co-parenting and becoming wonderful lifelong friends contribute to this expectation that, if we’re not emotionally overachieving with a person who usually feels more like a mortal enemy than a soulmate, that means we’re petty, unenlightened thugs of the lowest order. This is partly what makes Louis C. K. or Larry David so appealing in contrast. By embracing their petty thug status and lamenting (selfishly, lazily) the perils of divorce, they offer some respite from a world where you can’t so much as forget your reusable grocery bags without feeling like an enemy of the state.

“Kramer vs. Kramer” would most likely get panned today as a depressing Debbie Downer of a film. But watching it again as an adult left me with a satisfying sense that I endured something profoundly sad and emerged with a new feeling of resiliency. Like Ted Kramer’s mixing up a batch of French toast through a clenched smile, sometimes the urge to reshape a tragedy into a story of hope just undermines the hope therein. We don’t need to reimagine every disaster as a tale of heroism. We don’t need to turn every funeral into a celebration. A divorce is not a birthday party or a high-school reunion or a three-day restorative spa getaway. Just as there is a time to meditate, a time to live your best life, a time to be “fierce,” there is also a time to weep openly, a time to regret everything and a time to eat big doughnuts in bed. We all have a right to our own bad choices — and a right to feel bad about them too. As Lord Byron wrote, “Sorrow is knowledge.” So for God’s sake, let’s stop rushing to get to the good part.