Picking up where Phil recently left Benjamin Braddock to his scuba gear, I have been living with The Graduate one way or another for most of my life—sometimes taking it as straight-up farce, sometimes as sophisticated and urbane, sometimes as statement for a generation, sometimes not connecting with it at all ("too clever, too patronizing, and ultimately too glib to be taken seriously," as Phil interprets it), sometimes wanting to jump up and down with the pure joy of its accomplishment. In short, it seems to work for me like the old saw about not being able to step in the same river twice. It's always different from the way I remember it, there's almost always something I hadn't noticed before, and watching it again is never the same experience twice.
Mostly it's a comedy of manners, a spoof on the shallow values of the conformist/materialist '50s colliding with the self-conscious, only vaguely hip sexual liberation of the post-birth-control '60s. But even as it plays as a comedy—and as a comedy it sparkles—its center of gravity remains a black hole of dread, around which all the players are orbiting and into which they are all slowly, without exception, collapsing.
Evidence is on display in the clip at the link, starting with the fact that this movie will do virtually anything for a laugh. When Dustin Hoffman retreats to the back of the frame and unexpectedly begins pounding his head against the wall in his angst, it's a brilliant and very funny moment of physical comedy. At the same time, Anne Bancroft plays with such icy-cold precision that you are almost afraid to laugh, as if her laser derision will turn next on you.
So much here conspires to keep one off balance: Hoffman, in his debut performance, plays a callow 22-year-old, but he never looks particularly younger than his actual 30 years (not a youthful 30 either). Characters are so painfully isolated from one another they seem almost shrink-wrapped, and slowly suffocating. No moment of joy is ever real beyond its most basic superficialities; every moment of emotional pain feels equally faked. Each interaction plays like a chess match, lacking only a play-by-play announcer to call out the dynamics.
Across all of this is a soundtrack by Simon & Garfunkel full of songs I've heard all my life, and much too often, but which nevertheless in the context here come off fresh as flowers from the garden. The whole thing never seems to get old.
"Oh, no, Mrs. Robinson, I think you're the most attractive of all my parent's friends. I mean that."
Phil #22: The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) (scroll down)
Steven #22: The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
If nothing else, The Big Sleep and The Virgin Suicides have in common that I didn't like either one much the first time I saw it. My complaints about The Big Sleep, which I saw when I was 18, revolved around the incomprehensible script, but I finally got around to looking at it again a few years ago, and yeah, it's fine. The Virgin Suicides I looked at again and still don't much connect with it. I don't know Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, which might make a difference. It's definitely got a great soundtrack, but I think Lost in Translation is Sofia Coppola's best in every way so far by a lot.
I tried to watch Comfort and Joy recently. It's a hard movie to get at a reasonable price nowadays. I'm not even sure it's made it into a Region 1 DVD release yet (or whether my player handles Region 2). I acquired a used with emphasis on "used" VHS tape that had a tracking problem from the start. I saw probably the first 30 minutes and it looked good but the former Blockbuster tape was clearly failing. Hopefully on down the road one way or another. (I know. I need to get over my aversion to watching feature-length movies on YouTube. And I think I have just the project for that, down the line.)
"The Graduate" opened in December 1967, the same month I turned 21. I saw it early on, and hated it right from the start, maybe because it was heralded as such an incisive portrait of American youth at the apex of the 1960's, and yet I felt that it said nothing at all about my own life then. I've avoided going back to "The Graduate" for fifty years now, seeing only bits of it while changing channels or auditing documentaries about Hollywood, but when it was on TCM the other night, I made myself watch it, to see if I could manage a better relationship with the movie by this time. I still don't like it (see Phil's comment above -- me too), but maybe I have a bit more insight into it now.
ReplyDeleteDuring my original viewing in 1968, I was totally put off by Mrs. Robinson's rigidly icy seduction of Benjamin, because of the classist issues I read into that, with Mrs. R. using her wealth & status to dominate and control him. Looking at that situation again, now I see that Mr. Robinson and Benjamin's father are actually law partners, so the Braddocks may have had just as much bread (as Benjy's possession of a new Alfa Romeo Spider at the same time he has no job nor any apparent ambition might suggest), but certainly don't seem as ruthless as the Robinsons.
I continue to have difficulty with the chronological setting of "The Graduate". It seems implicitly set in 1967, the year of its filming and release, but except for a brief glimpse of head shops in Berkeley, there's no evidence at all that we're into the late '60s yet -- neither the civil-rights movement nor the Beatles have happened (MOR-folkies Simon & Garfunkel don't ring the zeitgeist bell for me), and even more tellingly, America doesn't seem to be at war in Vietnam. If he'd actually graduated from college in 1967, and wasn't headed to grad school, Benjamin's draft board would have yanked his II-S student deferment immediately, and called him in for a pre-induction physical. Hate to be so insistent on historical correctness, but the draft-bait scenario I've described happened to me exactly that way in 1968, so I like to see that youth-interrupter acknowledged in any portrait of young American malehood of the late '60s. I assume that the smeared chronology of the movie derives from Charles Webb's source novel having been published in 1963, thus likely written when the '50s were still fresh in his mind, that father-knows-best decade when America was forever rich & at peace. That's the era the movie feels like to me, even as some claim Mrs. Robinson represents the "sexual revolution" of the '60s. Not mine, baby.
Speaking of which, has anybody else noted that Benjamin spends much of the final third of "The Graduate" aggressively and obnoxiously STALKING Elaine?!? Yes, I know that I'm playing the historically-revised-correctness card here, but I don't think I found it too funny in 1968 either. The one positive highlight for me in seeing the movie again was realizing that William Daniels plays Mr. Braddock -- I'd forgotten that. Daniels had an impressive supporting role (as an OCD dad) in one of my favorite movies from 1967 (loved it both when it was brand new and in re-screenings recently),"Two for the Road", starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney in a romantic-cum-realistic portrait of a marriage over time, including dealing with the upheavals of the '60s. It gets my vote for a top 1967 film.
-- Richard "One Word: Plastics" Riegel
Thanks Richard, good stuff.
ReplyDeleteJust found this incisive vindication of my half-century-long take on this movie, in Louis Menand's "Now Do It As You" profile of Mike Nichols, in the New Yorker of February 8, 2021:
ReplyDelete"But it's also the case that expectations for Nichols's career were shaped by a misreading of who he was. 'The Graduate' is the story of a rich kid who has an affair with a rich woman and will presumably end up marrying her rich daughter. Benjamin's anomie is entirely unexplained. There are no political references in the movie. In the scenes set on the Berkeley campus, the students all look as though they were in prep school. It might as well be set in 1955. Nichols thought he was making a movie about Los Angeles, not the generation gap. There wasn't a radical or countercultural bone in his body."
As you noted in your 2020 re-review of "The Graduate", Jeff, the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack, for all its groovy feelings, gives the movie a late-'60s gloss that's just not there in the story itself.
Richard "Graduate school dropout" Riegel
Interesting discussion. My problem w/ The Graduate has always been the inscrutable, mute anger and alienation of the Hoffman character. The story seems more trivializing of the generation gap of 1967 than anything else.
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