Fifty years after its release, The Graduate still looms large in American culture. With the film back in theaters, WAMC’s Ian Pickus has this appreciation.
Seeing The Graduate on the big screen — which was possible this month thanks to the Fathom Events/Turner Classic Movies series — is a chance to notice the big and the small in Mike Nichols’ Best Picture Oscar nominee.
The big: the generational cleavage as 60s youth butts up against its parents’ bourgeois comforts; the star-making turn by Dustin Hoffman, whose offspring are today’s mumblecore manboys; the Simon and Garfunkel-heavy soundtrack that still sounds vital; and of course the titanic performance of Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson.
The small: the way an anti-Vietnam flyer hints at the decade’s coming turmoil; tucked in the corner of the screen in the film’s last act, set in Berkeley; the way a landlord there warns against “agitators;” the literal sweat that forms on the brow of Benjamin Braddock — and just about everyone else — as they fret about that eternal worry — the future, and what one’s role in it should be.
Half a century later, plastics, it turns out, may have been a good idea.
In its depiction of Braddock’s listlessness, Nichols’ adaptation of Williams College graduate Charles Webb’s novel anticipated life for many 20-somethings today, when gap years and vague notions of grad school and long weekends that become long months in the parents’ pool have become commonplace. Or maybe, trend pieces aside, these are not new middle class concerns?
We should expect as much from a film that dispenses with traditional notions of Hollywood endings.
As Katharine Ross’ Elaine Robinson and Braddock sit on that Santa Barbara municipal bus after the madcap wedding climax, impassive and contemplative, or maybe just exhausted, my mind drifted back to an earlier moment in the film. It comes before the illicit affair — one of film’s most memorable trysts, even though precious little of it happens on screen. Murray Hamilton’s Mr. Robinson tells Ben, ill-fatedly, to have fun now because “you can never be young again.” He’s right. No one can. Who wouldn’t go back to the summer after college just one more time?
But everyone worries about the future. People follow their hearts. They make mistakes — and learn from them.
Just as striking as the much-debated, much imitated final shot on that bus is the opening title sequence. Ben has just landed in L.A. after a cross-country flight. Hinting at the character’s central struggle, he’s moving forward, but involuntarily; he’s standing still on a conveyor belt. If this scene was shot today, he’d have his nose buried in a smartphone. But not in 1967.
Infidelity, heartbreak, obsession, alcohol, tobacco, adulthood: it’s all in front of him, whether he likes it or not.
