30 Minutes On: The Graduate

Released in late 1967, when the counterculture was in full swing, Mike Nichols’ second feature "The Graduate" sank its barbed wit deep into the zeitgeist, becoming one of the biggest commercial hits of all time. 

Adapted from Charles Webb’s comic novel by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry—with a mighty assist from Nichols, a visually gifted theater director-turned-filmmaker who wanted to communicate through images—it told the discomforting story of Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a former track star who comes home for the summer after graduation and falls into despair. The exact sources of Ben’s discontent are never spelled out—neither Ben nor his relatives or neighbors are much for introspection, much less philosophizing—but it’s clear from the way Nichols presents his gloomy withdrawal that American life bears much of the blame. The crass flaunting of real estate, clothes, automobiles, and consumer goods (including the scuba gear Ben’s dad buys him as a graduation present and forces him to try on for guests) fills up the space where empathy and connection ought to reside. Every time Ben turns around, somebody’s asking him if he’s thought about his future and giving him bland, unhelpful suggestions (“plastics”). The unspoken assumption is that Ben’s going to follow in the footsteps of his parents, and maybe the only thing he knows for sure is that he’s sure to succumb to that fate unless he starts taking some risks.

Ben’s stopgap solution, alas, is to embark on a shameful and thrilling affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), mother of Elaine Robinson (Katherine Ross), a college-bound high school senior that Ben somewhat fancies. Brilliantly written and acted, Mrs. Robinson is equal parts film noir seductress and hard-boiled screwball dame, smirking and leering through a haze of cigarette smoke—seemingly the only person in the movie who can stand outside of herself and take stock in what she’s become. She ensnares the eager Ben partly out of boredom and partly, it seems, to divert him from latching onto her daughter. 

Mrs. Robinson, too, fears history repeating itself, but her obsession is more self-flagellating. A sarcastic, sexy art history major in college, she once dreamed of a more exciting life. She numbs her present-tense malaise with booze, sex, and fashionable nihilism. Nichols and cinematographer Robert Surtees capture the affair, its aftermath, and the jolting midpoint entrance of Elaine in a series of impeccably composed, dynamically fluid Panavision images that turn wealthy Vietnam-era Los Angeles into a white collar (and just plain white) prison whose denizens have no idea how intellectually and emotionally limited their lives are. It’s like the zoo that Ben and Elaine visit in Berkeley, filled with bored mammals gazing into the distance like Ben drifting on a raft in his parents’ pool. Featuring one of the great pop soundtracks of all time, by Simon & Garfunkel, "The Graduate" is an ecstatically inventive portrait of the miserable rich, on par with anything produced by 1960s European Art Cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni with jokes.

More than one critic has observed that the film's cultural indestructibility comes from its detached way of letting us identify with whatever main character suits our world view at that point in time. Roger Ebert's original 1967 review identified strongly with Benjamin, but his revisitation thirty years later switched identification to Mrs. Robinson. "Today, looking at 'The Graduate,' I see Benjamin not as an admirable rebel, but as a self-centered creep whose put-downs of adults are tiresome. Mrs. Robinson is the only person in the movie who is not playing old tapes. She is bored by a drone of a husband, she drinks too much, she seduces Benjamin not out of lust but out of kindness or desperation." 

I wouldn't cosign that last assertion. She's certainly desperate, and there are moments where she seems to look at Ben with pity or amusement. But I don't think there's any kindness in her attention, nor recognition that he's a full human being—indeed, that he's anything but a naughty diversion, and later, an amorphous threat to Elaine's happiness. She's using him, like a film noir femme fatale minus the obligatory husband-murder plot. But she does seem to have more of an inner life, and certainly more self-awareness about her scuzzy, sad predicament, than anyone else in the picture. Nichols seems to think so, too. How else to explain the moments when he lets Mrs. Robinson, alone among all the major characters, stare directly into the lens, as if sharing a wicked secret with the audience? 

My own relationship with the film has passed through three stages of identification. When I first watched it as a high school student in the 1980s, I identified with Ben. Later, as a young parent in my thirties, I identified with Mrs. Robinson, not because her experience mirrored mine in any significant way (thank God) but because Bancroft's performance captured a bruised, worn-down, sadder-but-wiser quality that I understood then, having been kicked around by life a little bit. Her character is a casualty of ordinary pain, somebody who long ago realized that whatever dreams she had as a young person were never going to come true, and all that remained was distraction from awareness of that small-scale tragedy. 

Now, to my surprise, I identify with Elaine, the least compromised of the three major characters. It's not so much that I've reverted to a state of innocence and perpetual becoming; more so than I recognize in Elaine the seeds of all disappointment, and every mistake. The film's third act maneuvers her into a predicament that puts her greatly at risk of repeating her mother's life-altering errors from a previous generation. Ben, meanwhile, falls into a frenzied, manic, stalker-ish pattern while trying to "rescue" her from that. One of the things that makes the end of the film so powerful (still!) is the hint that all this exercise of free will, all this dramatic posturing and rushing about, only ends up depositing Ben and Elaine in much the same situation that Mrs. Robinson illuminated in her pillow-talk with Benjamin earlier in the film.