Movie review: "The Graduate" (1967)
Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft,
Katharine Ross
Director: Mike Nichols
106 minutes
Ya seen it twice, ya seen it two different times, ya seen two
different movies….
Full disclosure: I first watched this movie in 1968, soon
after it premiered.
Spoiler: The boy gets the girl.
What I most clearly remembered about seeing “The Graduate” the
first time was, of course, “Plastics!”
And, of course, the Simon and Garfunkel sound track, that’s still
a keeper.
I also remembered the seduction scene with the stocking
over the bent knee, and I remembered Ben and Elaine running away from her
aborted wedding to Carl.
I was a bit confused, a few days ago when I watched it again,
to discover that the movie isn’t so much about “boy gets girl” as it is about “boy
gets girl’s mother, then gets girl”…..
The seduction, the capitulation, the inept interlude, the
grotesque affair between the mismatched Ben and Mrs. Robinson take up a whole
lot of the plot and a whole lot of the running time. Far too much. By 1967
standards, the dalliance was somewhat steamily depicted but it really doesn’t
get your heart started now, it’s all too pathetic….
And the storybook romance between Ben and Mrs. Robinson’s
daughter is more disjointed than inept, but I guess I have to say Mike Nichols’
portrayal of two college-student-age lovers is a pretty good satirical rendition
of a 1967 “made in heaven” hookup.
The thing is, the only dramatic high point of the movie for
me, now, is the drive-in scene that softens the brutal first date scene: it’s
Ben’s angst about his life, as he candidly opens up to Elaine while they’re gobbling
sandwiches, as he haltingly reveals his tortured effort to get a grip on life,
as he says “You’re the first thing that I liked for so long, the first person I
could stand to be with…it’s like I’ve been playing some kind of game, but, the
rules don’t make any sense to me…they’re being made up by all the wrong people,
no, I mean, no one makes them up, they seem to make themselves up…”
This, I think, is the essence of “The Graduate,” and it’s mostly
the reason that I don’t plan to watch it again: Ben is bouncing off the walls,
other people are taking all the shots, he neither feels nor aspires to any honorable
form of agency, OK, he does fixate incoherently on his sudden decision to marry
Elaine, but, you know, that final scene in the back of the bus, it’s clear that
neither one of them is at all sure about what they’re doing.
“The Graduate”—there’s less there than meets the eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment