Post Graduate

Thirty years later, it's still a masterpiece

by Peter Keough

THE GRADUATE (1967). Directed by Mike Nichols. Written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, from the novel by Charles Webb. With Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross, William Daniels, Elizabeth Wilson, Murray Hamilton, and Brian Avery. A Strand/Rialto re-release. At the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Faced with college loans, shrinking employment, penurious parents, and the Millennium, graduates of the class of '97 can be forgiven for wanting to slap Benjamin Braddock in the face. Privileged by his education, wealthy background, and an era when seemingly unlimited optimism and opportunity had yet to be darkened by Vietnam, Ben can afford the luxury of alienation. What redeems him from being a spoiled brat and allows his plight to speak to every generation is his innocence and honesty. These qualities are indelibly limned by Dustin Hoffman's groundbreaking debut performance and Mike Nichols's subtle and acerbically compassionate direction. Thirty years later, despite the dimunition of all expectations, The Graduate still glows with the exuberance and dread of a life begging to be grasped, of bonds about to be slipped.

What's striking about Hoffman's first appearance on the screen is his triumphant passivity. Bland and fretful, with the melancholy sweetness of a stuffed animal, Benjamin Braddock descends snugly seatbelted into LAX. There he's conveyed like a sack of groceries via people mover to post-academic limbo as Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" intones bathetically on the soundtrack. A match cut to his suitcase bouncing more spiritedly along the baggage carousel underlines Benjamin's self-contained ineffectuality. It's a pose that endures and endears through most of the film until Benjamin, with more petulance than premeditation, defies the powers of complacency to seize what he desires.

In the meantime, he undergoes one of the most hilarious and rueful initiations in cinema. Fleeing fatuous guests at a welcome-home party for the safety of his room and his fishtank, Benjamin is unwitting prey for Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft, whose performance electrifies with its sexiness, ruthlessness, and pathos). With perfunctory calculation, she cons Benjamin into driving her home in his new sports car -- a graduation gift. The dialogue that ensues has the barbed convoluted logic of the finest Elaine Mays/Mike Nichols comedy routines leavened by Benjamin's ingenuous efforts at being suave ("You're trying to seduce me Mrs. Robinson . . . Aren't you?"). The outcome is never in doubt, with Ben gasping in horror at the primal scene of his hostess's apologetic, naked display.

Some note may be made of the Oedipal overtones of the moment (Mrs. Robinson and his mother suffer identical hair-frostings). More poignant, though, is Nichols's masterful mise-en-scène, his blocking of characters into the frame so as to contrast their conflicting perceptions, intentions, and points of view. As the late-returning Mr. Robinson engages Ben in a bull session about sowing wild oats, a reclothed Mrs. R. inconspicuously descends the stairs in the distance. "Doesn't he look like the kind who has to fight 'em off?" asks a clueless Mr. Robinson. Her face now filling the foreground and registering satisfaction and regret at her conquest, she answers, "Yes, he does."

The subsequent fumbling first night in the hotel is a justly cherished comic tour de force. Less lovingly remembered is the montage through which Ben's nights with Mrs. Robinson meld with his idle days by the pool, and his growing resentment at his entrapped-drone status. That resentment erupts in one of the film's ugliest scenes, in which Mrs. Robinson forbids Benjamin to see her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), and Benjamin -- having learned to be brutal -- says he's not proud of having an affair with a broken-down alcoholic.

When the taboo liaison with Elaine -- imposed not by Benjamin's will but by his parents' -- takes place, Benjamin seems hopelessly debased in his abusiveness. But something has changed; it's Nichols's style. No longer static and posed, the frame becomes fluid, rushing headlong in a hand-held pseudo-cinéma-vérité. Benjamin seems to thwart his fate of being contained -- whether by seat belts, scuba masks, glass partitions, society's materialistic and hedonistic preconceptions, or Nichols's diabolical composition. Undaunted by consequences or the opinions of others, he acts, pursuing his beloved. His car out of fuel, he dashes onward, at last liberated from the machinery that would encase him until, brought to a halt at the glass wall of the church, he howls her name with infantile abandon, and so frees them both.

Or does he? Brought to earth by the stares of the strangers on their getaway bus, and their own more troubling sidelong glances, the two recognize that they are thrust together on a journey that they do not control. The ending of The Graduate seems much the same as the beginning. Maybe that's the lesson to be taken in this post-Graduate world. When the ultimate lure to entrapment is one's utmost desires, perhaps the sounds of silence are the best one can expect.