Great satire has always been about punching up — whether it’s the Marx Brothers continually terrorizing Margaret Dumont in all her high-society finery, or The Philadelphia Story lampooning the comings and goings of socialite Katherine Hepburn’s poolside bedroom.
But by 1967, when The Graduate was released, the cultural landscape had shifted. The end of the Second World War brought about the rise of the middle class and the upper middle class, and suddenly our social betters didn’t seem so far away. We cared about their struggles and their disillusionment. As Peggy Lee sang just two years later in her ode to mid-century malaise, “Is That All There Is?” — because when everyone has enough and isn’t looking for more, the only place left to look is inward.
The Graduate is a satire on the comfortably affluent, one of the first in what has become a genre unto itself: a comedy that plumbs the depths of its well-tanned characters’ souls.
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, in his star turn) returns from college to the sun-kissed suburbs of Los Angeles, where an aimless summer makes way for a clandestine affair with his father’s business partner’s wife, the enigmatic Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft).
Ben finds little to be inspired by during his first season as a real adult. Will he go into “plastics”, get rich, and end up with his own pool in his own corner of the sun-kissed suburbs?
Ben is asking himself “Is that all there is?”; but the brilliance of the character is that he’s still a privileged, sheltered doofus, who will likely never find an answer to that question. After all, this is a guy who travels to Berkeley in 1967, but is entirely blind to the political hotbed because he’s only there to creep on a girl.
For Ben, Mrs. Robinson provides a darkly sexy alternative to bumming it in his parents’ pool house. She’s one of the great characters of the Sixties: sad, sultry, and deeply flawed, filled with forgotten dreams and dwindling passions. She’s feeding on Ben’s youth and inexperience like a leopard-printed vampire.
Directed by: Mike Nichols
Shown from left: Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman
It’s when Mrs. Robinson’s college-aged daughter Elaine (a doe-eyed Katherine Ross) arrives on the scene that Benjamin’s romantic taste shifts from mother to child, and the dynamic between the Braddock and the Robinson families is forever tainted.
The Graduate was directed by Mike Nichols, in his sophomore cinematic effort, after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). Nichols paints California in glowing, saturated widescreen, as photographed in by Robert Surtees.
The movie is filled with inspired visual storytelling. In the first moments of Mrs. Robinson’s seduction of a nerve-racked Ben, he’s famously framed by her beckoning arched leg; then later a delirious P.O.V. shot from inside Benjamin’s new scuba suit tracks past his toothy, gawking parents and their cocktail-swilling friends and ends with him plunging to the bottom of the pool and sitting alone, strangled in chlorinated blue.
But the real strength of Nichols’s direction is in how he lets the languid, character-driven scenes between Ben and Mrs. Robinson play out without any superfluous editing – a technique most definitely honed by Nichols’s performances on-stage as one half of the comedy duo “Nichols and May”.
The movie is based on Charles Webb’s novel, with a screenplay co-authored by Calder Willingham and comedy legend Buck Henry, who brings a rakish wit to the proceedings. Henry himself plays the hotel clerk who pops up from behind the desk and asks, “Are you here for an affair, sir?”
The music was provided by Simon and Garfunkel (like you didn’t already know that), repurposing their unpublished demo “Mrs. Roosevelt” as the legendary theme song “Mrs. Robinson”. Their music infuses the story with a poppy momentum as well as a deep melancholy, like when Ben is at his most lovelorn and the needle drops on their lilting version of “Scarborough Fair”.
The influence of The Graduate’s music, deft comic scripting, and keen-eyed photography can be seen throughout the works of contemporary filmmakers like Wes Anderson and David O. Russell, but that’s only surface level. The Graduate’s empathetic portrayal of the pouty upper middle class is prevalent in almost any modern story of the haves and the have-nots: without the Braddocks and Robinsons, there are no Royal Tenenbaums.
Spoilers ahead: At the end of the film, when Ben has gleefully highjacked Elaine’s quicky wedding, and dragged her onto a passing bus, there’s a moment of pause. Ben and Elaine, both characters who have been given almost anything they could want in life, suddenly realize they might have made a terrible decision to blow it all up.
As the audience we see ourselves in Ben and Elaine. We care about them, so we find ourselves asking the same deep questions they are: What’s their future? Is the thrill over? And maybe most importantly: Is that all there is? The Graduate, one of the best of the 60’s, screens at 1:55 p.m. on Sunday, October 19th, at the Marie Dressler Foundation’s Vintage Film Festival, at the Capitol Theatre, Port Hope.