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Dustin Hoffman is out of his depth in coming-of-age comedy The Graduate |
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman – actually nearly 30) is a
fresh-faced young graduate, top of his class and a sports star. Arriving back
home in California, he’s depressed, lost, uncertain about what he wants from
life, but pretty sure it isn’t the litany of office, marriage and a career in “plastics”
that his parents expect. His isolation brings him to the attention of Mrs
Robinson (Anne Bancroft – only 6 years older than Hoffman), the wife of his
father’s business partner. She sets about to seduce him, partly out of boredom,
partly perhaps because she feels the same ennui and depression as he does (not
that Benjamin ever notices – more on that later). They start a long summer
affair, conducted with supreme awkwardness on Benjamin’s part, which suddenly
becomes complex when he falls for her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). Can
true love triumph?
The good first. The film’s
popularity was grounded in its wit – and it has a very funny script by Buck
Henry, who also appears in one of the film’s funniest sequences, as an overly helpful
desk clerk at the hotel where Benjamin is awkwardly trying to book a room for his
assignation. The film is pacey and energetic and full of imaginative cuts (a brilliant
one sees Benjamin flopping out of a pool, jump cutting to him descending onto Mrs
Robinson in bed) and directorial flourishes. It’s a dynamic and sexy young
film, full of bounce and appeal, with some great jokes.
Mike Nichols – who won the film’s only Oscar for Best
Director – shoots the film with real vibrancy. He does a fantastic job getting
us to invest in Benjamin. A huge percentage of the film sees the camera focus
in on Benjamin, usually in medium-shot or close-up – and it’s a rare moment
when he isn’t in frame. The camera rarely leaves him for the first ten minutes,
first zooming out from a close-up of him sitting on a plane, following him
along a conveyor belt to the terminal (where his blankness slowly changes to
fearful anticipation of what waits at home) to tracking along beside him at his
welcome home party. This party is stuffed with his parents’ friends, and Ben’s
isolation, claustrophobia and insecurity seem all the more striking as the
camera gets closer and closer to him. It’s a superb example of using the camera
to build empathy for the character.
Nichols’ excellent work continues throughout the film, which
makes excellent use of shots, editing and zooms to make us experience Benjamin’s
emotions, helping us root for him. It also helps that the film is scored to
some of the finest music Simon and Garfunkel ever performed. The slightly sad,
wistful feel to their songs – from Sound of Silence to Scarborough
Fair – seems to perfectly frame Benjamin’s doubts, just as the slightly
more hopeful beats of Mrs Robinson seem to capture him embracing freedom
at the film’s end.
The decision to cast Hoffman pays off in spades. Hoffman is no one’s idea of a WASPy sports-star alpha male, but he’s everyone’s idea of an outsider. His performance is pitched perfectly – awkward, shy, uncertain, unaffected and natural. In fact, the film is pretty much perfectly cast. Anne Bancroft’s performance defined her whole career, the predatory Mrs Robinson whom she invests with touches of emotional vulnerability and more than a trace of the very same depression and fear that Benjamin is feeling. An entire generation effectively fell in love with the charming Katharine Ross.
Freedom is what the film is all about. But today, you feel
the film skims only lightly on depths it could explore in detail. Benjamin can feel
all the ennui he likes: he’s got it so made, I wish I had his problems. With
his wealth, his fast car, the vast array of businessmen falling over themselves
to offer him low-work-high-reward jobs, not to mention the gallery of
attractive women throwing themselves at him, it’s the sort of misery only the
rich enjoy. Almost constantly dressed in suit and tie, with his combed down
hair, he looks a million miles from the generation that would party at
Woodstock and protest Vietnam. Benjamin probably went on to vote for Reagan
(twice). There is nothing counter-culture about him whatsoever. He ticks off noisy
teenagers at a drive in and seems to find the young as hard to understand as
the old. He’s less a generation adrift, more of an individual misfit.
The film though loves him to pieces, in the same way it largely
treats Mrs Robinson as somewhere between a joke and a monster. She’s written as
either a horny exploiter of youth, or a vengeful harpy. Rather than a ruthless
cougar, today she seems to be more of a vulnerable, damaged figure. Every scene
with Bancroft carries moments of pain, sadness and world-weary depression. Why
else is she so able to spot these traits in Benjamin? Watch her desperation and
hurt when Benjamin starts to date her daughter. That’s real humanity there,
miles from the empty selfishness of Benjamin, who genuinely doesn’t get why she
could take it so amiss that he intends to replace her with her own daughter.
The most striking moment in the film that captures this is the scene where Benjamin attempts small talk during one of their nights together. The film wants us to think Ben is looking for something real, and that Mrs Robinson just wants the sex. But the conversation is a masterclass from Anne Bancroft of suppressed pain and regret, as she talks of having to drop her art degree because she was seduced by her husband, of years of living an empty life. Benjamin of course doesn’t get it – he guesses she dropped the art because she wasn’t interested – and then gets cross when he feels he’s being belittled. Mrs Robinson’s sad eagerness to persuade him to stay is rather affecting – more than the film really allows. I credit Anne Bancroft with much of this.
And then we have Elaine. The second half of the film shifts
gear dramatically from the first. While the first half is a sex comedy and
study of suburban discontent, the second seems to change into the sort of
celebration of youthful energy that the first half could be said to be
partially satirising. Elaine is an independent young woman, embracing her
education and the opportunities it offers. Suddenly, an energised Benjamin is
tearing across country to win Elaine back (let’s put aside that Benjamin behaves
in this section like something between a stalker and a creep).
However, as the film nears its conclusion, that celebration
of the promise of youth is undercut somewhat, as Elaine chooses to make all the same mistakes her mother made. The
film even hints at this with its famous ending shot. After eloping from her
wedding, Elaine and Ben sit on the back seat of the bus. The camera holds the
shot as they laugh, until they stop laughing and then sit next to each other,
and then awkwardly look this way and that as if waiting for someone to tell them
what to do. What do they really have in common? Having made a spontaneous
decision like this, what happens next? It’s another little genius flourish by
Nichols – although it’s also the film having its cake and eating it, selling
the sequence before this as a triumph of true-love, then asking us to question
if the world is that simple.
Some of these ideas felt lost in the excitement of the
film’s first release, when it captured a wave of public feeling. But the older
the film gets, the more awkward it looks. As if the kids who watched it in the
sixties and turned into the Reaganite Baby Boomers of the 1980s, slowly
realised that the message it was selling was not quite true and perhaps their
parents weren’t that different after all.
Watching The Graduate today, I found it hard to shake
the feeling that if I flashed forward to the characters’ lives in 1997 I would
find a very different, but still very similar story. Benjamin Braddock would be
a wealthy businessman, still dressed in suit and tie, who went into plastics or
computers or some such and swallowed the “greed is good” mantra from his
corner-office. Elaine a depressed housewife, mother to a couple of kids, who
left her dreams of forging her own life behind to marry the subject of a
youthful fling. Who, with her own regrets, finally understands the sadness and
misery at the core of her mother’s life. And is making eyes at that attractive
young man next door…
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