Plastics.

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2016)

Benjamin Braddock is at the tender age in his life where the whole world awaits him and the possibilities are endless. Well, less endless then he might hope; his parents expect him to go on straight into graduate school with a long list of accolades and a much shorter list of career pathways. The frame shakes as he is rocked by each invasive query, each violation of his tender emotional state, each beady eye and ruffle of the hair. This delicate stage of every promising young man's life is full of tricky contradictions and impossible expectations; they baby and smother him, they tweak his nose, they carefully plan out every stone in the path. At the same time they are urging him to overreach, to surpass his potential, in other words...to act and behave like an adult almost immediately. Hoffman was twenty-nine, but doesn't he emblematise exactly where Ben is at; the constant agony carved deep into his face, the almost teary eyes, the stiffness in his body as he is maneuvered around the party's guests like an automaton.
And so this goes on and on, for far too long, but I suppose the few weeks or months the film depicts must be an eternity of anguish for someone in their youthful twenties. Again and again we are thrust into the closeup of his despondent face, and then the zoom out reveals just how lonely he is, even in the midst of crowds of civilians (on a plane, or at a college campus). The film is deliberately drenched in the melancholic tunes of Simon & Garfunkel, as if it was Ben himself stuck by the radio in self-mourning (it's missing those delightful acoustic licks that would be in the studio version later). There may be a seldom instance of brief respite - see Ben surrounded by pure darkness, and then the witty zoom out that reveals it is just the hotel bed-board, the equivalent of a sly wink from Nichols - but it becomes so difficult to unearth anything else from Ben, so submerged in his grief. There are other neat camera and editing tricks, which seem frivolous at best.
Naturally, all this moping around makes him an easy target for Mrs Robinson. She stalks around his innocent inhibitions, frames him like prey through the outline of her legs. Initially it seems harmless, a bit of naughty fun. He makes the accusation with a wide grin on his face, and the soundtrack sneaks in cheekily, like a twisted porno. Eventually it becomes obvious just how inexperienced he is, and how she is merely taking advantage of his situation to tame her primal needs. She's clever enough to prod him lightly into what she wants, prevent him from realising what she is doing. In the middle of the affair Ben refuses to go on, but she ever so slyly gives him a dose of his own medicine, turning self-conscious, and immediately he relents, because an intrinsic morality and nobility has been instilled into him. But Nichols is so determined to stack the odds against the older generation, so she is never developed further along the lines of her tragic past, and becomes a mean-spirited, stuffy stereotype. A better film might have folded Ben's own sensibilities and insecurities back into Mrs Robinson, making the whole tryst a doubly desperate attempt to recapture that youth, the fleeting moments of freedom, irresponsibility and spirit. But she is simply a predator. Her conversations with Ben are as empty as those of him and her daughter.
The first impression of Nichols' goal by many (and still quite a few) is a celebration of the youthful vivacity of Ben, of his daring and radical relinquishment of all that is expected of him. The adults are all screaming themselves hoarse at his intrusion, and even Mrs Robinson has grown old and blind enough that her entrapment has been forgotten and she too is yelling. Ben is adamant to break the cycle; look at his disgust when Elaine mentions the putrid and unromantic method that she has been proposed to. It's no jumping on a bus and running away, which is in itself vague and directionless after the excitement has worn off. Nichols avoids any overt contextualisation, but the subtext is there, the counter-culture of the 60s, fighting hard for peace, for sex, for drugs, for equality, for the shedding of society's artificial excess. So these hippies and bohemians wanted widespread societal change, the overthrowing of the authoritative structures that bound them, but what then? Noble ventures aside, many of these endeavours seem more and more as fruitless and frozen-in- time as the lull in the back of that bus, as the young pair exchange nervous glances and the fervour slowly wears off. Perhaps a corporate desk job at Plastics Inc. might not have been so bad after all. Where oh where is Joe DiMaggio in a time like this?