Few movies about the plight of the young have any sort of lasting, immortal cohesion. Check THE BREAKFAST CLUB, for instance. Good movie, doesn't hold up so well over time. THE GRADUATE, however, cannot be lauded enough, and though it's steeped so heavily in Sixties counterculturalism that it's a signpost for the whole movement itself, it still manages to be warm, funny, disconcerting, and ultimately, not so sure that the answers it presents are really answers at all.
Dustin Hoffman had his big breakthrough with this film, as did director Mike Nichols. From the outset, we're shown recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock's isolation from his family and the world around him, particularly in the opening shot of Benjamin on an airport moving sidewalk, framed expressionless against featureless concrete and being dragged toward…something. He not only won't make a decision about his future despite prodding from friends and relatives, he CAN'T. He's paralyzed from the soul up.
Ben finds a welcome, desperate, and near-joyless relief in the bed of Mrs. Robinson, his neighbor and the wife of his father's business partner. Their trysts are more confrontation than connubial, though Ben has no other answers, no other avenues, and he plummets headlong into an adulterous cycle…until Elaine Robinson, Mrs. Robinson's daughter, returns home from school herself. What then happens shatters Ben's suburban, comfortable dream world and forces him into action.
It can be argued that Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Katherine Ross have never been better on screen before or since. They act as weights and counterweights in what is effectively both a conflict between generations and between good (which isn't always so good) and evil (which is not always truly evil). There are also some humorous supporting turns from screenwriter Buck Henry and Mr. Roper himself, Norman Fell, stretching his range as a landlord for a Berkeley apartment building. After all, this IS ostensibly a comedy, and a very funny one. It also shows the power of this story's execution that an audience can so identify with Benjamin, a character who behaves as a silly boob (even a nasty boob on his first date with Elaine) throughout most of the film.
This is just one of those films where everything's in synchronicity and everything works, where the camera is plugged into a higher power making the film transcend the vast majority of celluloid product. It's as if the film taps into the energy of the Sixties and Berkeley, California and post-adolescent angst and imparts that onto the viewer. Although many might consider this to be a film about protest, it's really about the difficulties of growing up and maintaining any sort of idealism in a plasticene, compromising culture, and how we're fated to fall into that quagmire no matter how good our intentions may be.
As a side note, THE GRADUATE also set a watermark in using pop songs in a soundtrack with Simon & Garfunkel's excellent original tunes, and althou
gh they genuinely convey mood and character here, songs later became vehicles to sell a soundtrack and not much else. How ironic that a film reacting in its way against faceless corporate lowest-common-denominatorism would spawn bastardized practices that would juice those companies for decades hence, huh?
Finally, that ending scene---it's arguably the best ending scene in film history, and it's certainly my personal favorite. Benjamin and Elaine on the bus---running from their parents and their responsibilities in a burst of vigor and energy, and where most films would have cut on their smiles and rolled the credits---Nichols chooses to linger----and see the doubts and the ramifications of their actions play across Benjamin and Elaine's faces. We can make decisions, and they may even be the RIGHT ones, but there's always a piper to pay. And even though we run from society, sooner or later we still have to live in it.
Heady stuff for a comedy. But it's still genius.