1967: The Graduate

The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) 6/10

"Are you here for an affair, sir?" (Hotel Clerk to Benjamin Braddock)

Forty years ago, the most popular summer release was not an effects-laden sequel about a super hero, but a social satire about an affair between a bumbling twenty-one year old college graduate and the wife of his father's business partner. Grossing $104 million (approximately $624 million when adjusted for inflation), The Graduate became the highest grossing film of 1967 and the fourth highest grossing film of the decade behind The Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago and 101 Dalmatians.

In the film, recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), returns home to California from his eastern school. Feted by his parents and "worried about his future," the alienated twenty-something seeks an outlet for his boredom through an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft): the sultry, alcoholic wife of his father's business partner (Murray Hamilton). Things become complicated however when Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross) returns from Berkeley, only for Benjamin to fall in love with her.

Released three weeks after Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate spawned a flurry of catchphrases, popularized the music of Simon and Garfunkel and turned struggling Method actor Dustin Hoffman into a star. Yet, it could have been all so different had Simon and Garfunkel sang "Mrs. Roosevelt" instead of "Mrs. Robinson," or if Warren Beatty or Robert Redford were cast ahead in the part of the nervy and uncomfortable Benjamin Braddock. In casting the diminutive Jewish Hoffman in the lead role, no longer was physical appearance or ethnicity requisite to become a box-office draw.

Along with Bonnie and Clyde, the film became a massive hit with discontented and alienated youth audiences in Vietnam-era America. In Benjamin Braddock, audiences found a figure that they could relate to: a very ordinary young man stifled by expectations, reputations and a hollow sense of what the future holds. Yet, despite the changes The Graduate brought about in terms of casting and soundtracking, one wonders what truly was revelatory about The Graduate?

Certainly, Braddock's constant breaks with the expectations of others, beginning with his affair with Mrs. Robinson and completed by his hinging of a five foot crucifix into a church door, represented a breach with established values and mores of the era. But, time has not been kind to The Graduate. The rebellious ethos that once aerated in its California climes, now fetors with the musty scent of conformity.

Spending most of his time in his childhood room or in his parents swimming pool, Benjamin Braddock, the antithesis of rebellion, somehow managed to become a generational hero. Granted his parents do not seem to understand him, but with his nervy twitches and sweaty-palmed disposition, Benjamin is less of a hero and more of a villain: a figure who simply never grew up. Throughout The Graduate, Benjamin has no friends, no ambitions, no countercultural affiliations and no direction; yet, he manages to become the smouldering object of desire for two women in the same household.

In Benjamin Braddock, there is a true rebel without a cause. The rebellion he engages in by spending his nights with Mrs. Robinson serves as an escape: filling in the hours between drinking in his parents pool and hearing his father (William Daniels) attempt to instill some motivation in his lacklustre son. By engaging in this affair, he breaks with the decorum of his parents middle class expectations, only to in the end comply with their wishes by courting Mrs. Robinson's bland daughter Elaine.

Today, Braddock represents the bourgeois consumer, rather than a model for class noncomformance. For his graduation, his affluent parents supply him with a new Alfa Romeo convertible, which Benjamin has no qualms about accepting: proceeding to frequently wheel around town in the manner of an imbecilic adolescent. Like a model consumer, Benjamin always wants what he cannot have. In Mrs. Robinson, he acquires a lonely, broken and exotic housewife. After having taught him "the birds and the bees," Benjamin proceeds to abandon her for the one thing she requests him not to want: her daughter.

Encouraged by his parents, Benjamin dates Elaine and eventually falls for her by proclaiming only she makes him feel "real." But, like with Mrs. Robinson, when Benjamin finally is with Elaine, neither he or she have anything meaningful to say. Perhaps, his only genuine acts of emotion come in his quest to track her down, but this desire is more self-serving than altruistic. In an era in which social harmony was preached, it is ironic that Benjamin's emotional greed and spirit of doing your own thing was applauded. In Benjamin, the "Me Generation" and the nepotistic, impulsive youth of today found their idol in a self-absorbed young man simply happy to live off his parents success.

Rather than a social satire, the film is more of a social tragedy: a forewarning of the collapse of an idealistic era. Nichols' uneven direction creates two completely different halves. The first is a fantastic blend of sex and screwball comedy in which bashful Benjamin acquires sexual knowledge through an attentive teacher. Through Benjamin's empty insistence on communicating with one another, the physical relationship bears its first problems. But is also in this sequence, that the movie begins to collapse into a stereotypical conclusion to a romantic comedy.

The rampant misogyny and self-centered cruelty associated with Benjamin bleeds through onto the celluloid. He mocks Mrs. Robinson for having conceived Elaine in the back of a Ford, callously critiques their relationship and insenstively approaches topics such as her marriage and her overtly distressing choice to quit art school. Once Elaine is mentioned into the story, the film loses its tight kinetic thrust as Benjamin almost immediately tells Elaine of the affair: not before taking her to a strip club on their first date.

Mrs. Robinson rejects any proposal of a relationship between Benjamin and Elaine because they are too well suited. Evidently, mother knows best as they are both colourless, apolitical idiots who operate on impulse, rather than cold calculation. All though she does not allude to it, perhaps in Benjamin, Mrs. Robinson simply sees another future corporate stooge: acquiring a job at a plastics company through social networking, rather than individual skill or distinctiveness. Through her sexual cunning and prowess, Mrs. Robinson endears to offer Benjamin something more exotic than a life less ordinary.

Yet through Buck Henry's script and Nichols' direction, her desire to restrict Elaine from Benjamin turns Mrs. Robinson from a kind and patient woman into a histronic villain by the film's end. Despite her alcohol-sapped creativity, Mrs. Robinson evidently supplies more youthful charm and seductive wit than her bland offspring and incomplete lover.

Played with sensitivity and restraint by Anne Bancroft (who was 39 at the time and only nine years older than Hoffman), Mrs. Robinson is one of the greatest female characters in American cinema history: a rare strong female character in film who persuasively tries to procure something; only for her to be naturally end up crushed and embittered. In her character lies the spirit of thousands of other repressed women of the era, who gave up their creative university-educated livelihoods to raise children in loveless marriages: garnering comfort from vices such as alcohol and only recapturing an element of youthful affection from an intimate relationship with a cowardly local bore.

In Benjamin Braddock, Hoffman imbues the character with his now trademark quirks: filling the role early on in the picture with authentic post-graduation ennui. Katherine Ross fares less better, although Buck Henry's script is unable to create her into a fully developed woman: allowing her sexual promiscuity to overstep her lack of personality and inability to intelligently analyze situations. Mike Nichols' Nouvelle Vague inspired direction has its moments, particularly in an array of interesting shots such as Mrs. Robinson reflected in a coffee table and the edits in which Benjamin neglects the middle-class reputations of his parents for his own pleasure.

Yet, the themes of middle class malaise and stagnation Nichols attempts to infuse into his film sorely lack the sarcastic sneer of Godard or Fellini, or the visual emptiness evoked by Antonioni or Bergman in similar films during the decade. Time has sealed the breaks with conformity Benjamin once represented and fashioned him as cinema's most unlikely countercultural hero. Unrepresentative and unaware of the political and social turmoil around him, Benjamin's sheltered life under his caring parents roof is to be envied, not scorned. His sense of alienation appears to be due to a lack of incentive to abandon the closeted world of his childhood and step out into something new. In Mrs. Robinson, Benjamin is offered a way out, but instead he rejects it for a life with Elaine already filled with uneasy silence and failed motivations. And thus while Benjamin's job in plastics awaits, here's to you Mrs. Robinson...

* The Graduate is available through MGM Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque