Indeed, the power of Ben's career claustrophobia, the horror he feels as people keep asking what his plans are, may last another 30 years. Nichols places him underwater a lot, as though he really were a creature who literally can't breathe the earth's atmosphere. It's because of this that he struck a chord with viewers for so long. Of course, Ben is an explorer from another planet - the planet of teenagers - let loose among the strange culture of adults. For my money, the scene in which Ben appears at his parents' barbecue, decked out from head to foot in scuba gear like a mute space explorer, is one of the best evocations of alienation - youthful or otherwise - ever captured on film.
SIGNPOST SYMBOL MOVIE
Robinson, it's clear that Bancroft outclassed not only her own hateful role but pretty much the whole film.Įven now the movie is not without its charms. (We're all in plastics now, aren't we?) Ben's parents, rather than hypocrites and conformists, just seem like people who came a few minutes too late to the New Frontier. Today "The Graduate's" most remembered phrase has lost its irony. Alas, to our naive '60s eyes, this seemed revolutionary. What gave "The Graduate" its long-standing appeal was that it proffered a chance for Ben and his real-life contemporaries to literally fuck the parent images in his life, destroy them and - having seemingly earned the moral upper hand - step into their shoes. Indeed, the film's view of marriage, sexuality and the suburbs is closer to stodgy old John Updike than Erica Jong. Well, that's a pretty odd fable to seed a fresh, radicalized youth movement with, to feed a generation needing to replace its parents' status-conscious, material-based dogma for living. Only she, it seems, can rescue him from the sordid experience of having slept with her mother. Passively misogynistic and emotionally muddled, the story is about a young man who has an affair with an older woman and then, growing tired of her, becomes determined to marry her virginal daughter. All things considered, it's had a pretty amazing shelf life - a good 15 years or so of near-deserved cultdom before its mustiness began to show. The film unleashed Dustin Hoffman upon the world (it was actually his third movie) and got Mike Nichols an Oscar for directing (the best-movie Oscar went to "In the Heat of the Night"). Released in 1967, "The Graduate" made the third highest box-office profit of any American film up to that time. That's remarkable, considering that if you were picking through today's cultural altar, you'd have to take the entire "Brady Bunch" oeuvre, and throw in Kurt Cobain, to come close to conjuring up the equivalent of "The Graduate" as a zeitgeist land mine. No longer a blueprint for liberation, it's practically an anthem to conformity. What's alarming is that the film, which so perfectly captured its era, seems to have turned on us. Or that from the vantage point of '90s adulthood, Ben's "alienation" seems downright dreamy. Or that Anne Bancroft, cast as a middle-aged parent, is a mere six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who's supposed to be 20. Never mind that "The Sound of Silence" may be the most laughable musical backdrop for a seduction ever recorded. (Women, in particular, may be disappointed to rediscover that Ben's coming of age requires them to participate from the wrong side of the bed sheet.) Or perhaps "The Graduate" is really a tragedy, considering that what we thought we were watching was something altogether different than what's actually on the film.
In fact, what was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose "countercultural" message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde. How sheepish one feels, realizing the movie is no work of genius. Now that it's hit its 30th birthday, the film throws our '60s shortsightedness in our face. What did these musty hieroglyphics once signify?įor viewers who remember it as part of their upbringing, "The Graduate" presents an entirely different problem. The cloyingly sweet Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. To anyone seeing it for the first time, "The Graduate" must seem as dated as "Stagecoach." A boy, a Mrs.
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