The Graduate: Mike Nichols' Shallow Exercise in Style
The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) was one of the most esteemed films of its time, winning Best Direction and Picture Oscars and several other nominations. It now ranks #7 on the AFI list of the 100 greatest films of all time. The theme of the failure of communication was fashionable at the time and informs the film as well as the Simon and Garfunkel song ("The Sound of Silence") used for several sequences. No one talks to anyone else or, if they do, they talk nonsense ("plastics") or misconstrue one another. Yet a closer look at the film reveals a shallow core inside a superficial stylistic wrapping.
The film narrates the story of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate, and his adulterous affair with a family friend, called Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). The affair is complicated by Ben's romantic pursuit of Mrs. Robinson's daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). Structured like a fairy tale, the movie shows how the hero has to fight evil obstacles to win his chosen woman.
Much of the film's apparent distinction on first release was probably due to its obtrusive stylistic effects. These include graphic cuts, such as Benjamin diving into the pool only to end up in his bed in another scene. A sound bridge of his father calling him begins in the pool scene but ends in the bedroom scene.
The use of contemporary Folk-Rock songs as commentative music also insured the movie's popularity, especially among the young. The theme of youthful alienation (called, in Simon and Garfunkel's song, "the sound of silence") was a then fashionable theme given an Oedipal subtext in the film. For example, Mrs. Robinson's husband tells Benjamin he considers him his "son," hence, Benjamin is, symbolically, sleeping with his own mother.
In Fairy Tale fashion, Mrs. Robinson functions as a mythical Witch figure, obstructing the hero's goals until she suffers ignominious defeat at the end. Pretentiously, this defeat occurs in a church.
Christian symbolism is used but none of it resonates with the rest of the drama, which is basically a boy-girl romance packaged as a youth protest drama. Thus Benjamin uses the church cross to obstruct the pursuers. Before that he spreads his arms wide in an obvious reference to the crucified Christ.
The problem is none of these ideas is worked out in the film. They appear more as stylistic flourishes than as realistically worked out drama.
In fact almost nothing is effectively dramatized in the film. Instead the screenwriter allows the characters to tell us what should have been dramatized instead.
For example, we're told about the then contemporary Berkeley campus protests by a hostile landlord who rents Benjamin a room, but no campus protests are seen. Mrs. Robinson rather incongruously informs Benjamin she's an alcoholic, but her alcoholism is never dramatized in the film. In fact, Paul Simon's song, "Mrs. Robinson," tells us more about her alcoholism than we see in the film.
Besides, Mrs. Robinson may be the first alcoholic to announce (frivolously at that) that she's an alcoholic. Usually it takes a last-hope admission to Alcoholics Anonymous for a person to screw up the courage to call herself an alcoholic, the first step in a patient's cure.
But there are more serious problems with the film. The most critical is the lack of any clearly defined characters, much less characters we feel sympathy for.
Benjamin is such a naif and passive cipher it's difficult to use him as a model for youth or as an object of sympathy for older people. Nor is there any depth to his character. We're told nothing of his tastes, or his likes and dislikes. Not even a poster on the wall or an audiocassette reveals anything about him. Instead, in a few seconds of dialogue with Elaine in the car, we learn that he's rebelling against parents who don't understand him.
Since he has no friend in the film, one wonders if he has any identity apart from his function in the script to be seduced by an older woman. We know people by those they associate with. Since Benjamin has no associates we learn nothing of him.
Similarly, his parents are more parental stereotypes than people. The family friends, too, seem bland types that enjoy parties around a pool.
The pacing of the film is odd too. Periods of longeurs, when almost nothing happens (the film has some of the worst editing of an Oscar-winning picture), are intermitted by scenes when everything happens too quickly.
After interminable scenes of Benjamin in a pool, suddenly Ben falls in love with a girl he's known all his life. Just as suddenly she screams hysterically when she finds he's had an affair with her mother. Then, for no apparent reason, she impulsively reconciles with him.
The other major character, Mrs. Robinson, is similarly undeveloped. There's some point in this, however. She's obviously a mythic figure, the Evil Witch, and obstacle to the hero.
But a myth can inform a drama and give it depth and resonance; it's no substitute for drama. It's puzzling, for example, why Mrs. Robinson would, out of the blue, announce herself as an alcoholic (other than to save time showing this). It's also puzzling why she would be attracted to Benjamin in the first place. He's not especially desirable. (Here Hoffman is miscast; a "hunk," even an unattractive one, would have been more convincing as an object of middle-aged lust.) True, his shyness might be a temptation for one kind of woman, if we accept the mythic level of the film ("the devouring female"). But even devouring females want something to devour.
It's the devouring female, played by Anne Bancroft, who gives the film what interest it has. She manages to be both attractive and repelling at the same time, which is the essence of her character.
Dustin Hoffman's performance, on the other hand, is awkward. He gives us no sense of who Benjamin is, or of the conflicts within the character.
Hoffman isn't entirely to blame; the script left him little to work on. Suddenly Ben tells his parents he's going to marry Elaine, though she doesn't know it yet. That's supposed to be witty dialogue or character development. Nichols must have known there was nothing to the scene so he gave it a little punch by having the toaster pop up to indicate Benjamin's change from passivity to pursuit.
But apart from such stylistic flourishes, which surely appealed to contemporary critics, Nichols' direction is muddled. Nichols, then a well-known stage director, isn't sure whether he's directing a physical comedy or a dramatic comedy.
Often scenes are presented as pure physical comedy. Here again Nichols has to show off his stylistic technique, as when Benjamin asks Elaine a question before she enters a class and Nichols follows with a graphic cut on Elaine after the class is over, with Benjamin repeating the same question.
One terrible example of physical comedy is when a stream of elderly hotel patrons emerge from a revolving door while Benjamin waits patiently. A scene like this would work in a Silent Comedy (Chaplin or especially Keaton could mine it for laughs), but what's the point in a dramatic comedy? Similarly, the hotel clerk (incidentally, played by scriptwriter, Buck Henry) pounds on the hotel bell and hits Benjamin's hand instead. Instead of showing the fear and pathos of a young man's first sexual encounter, Nichols opts for silly physical business instead.
This problem is noticeable from the first sequence, when Benjamin is told by his father's friend of the future of "plastics." They each repeat the other's name twice before the conversation, such as it is, even begins.
It's not so much that the scene itself is not funny; it doesn't even fit the kind of film Nichols seems to want to make: a dramatic comedy. The timing of this scene is awful. The long pauses in the dialogue suggest a moment of great wit, but the scene ends up being silly. Still it's the clearest statement of the film's subject: a rebellion against the shallow materialism of the older generation.
Ironically, a movie intended to reveal the shallowness of contemporary culture through the eyes of youth revealed, instead, the shallowness of youth, and of a director apparently enamored of youth himself.
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