A parable for the time, a truly funny drama, and brilliance dripping from every scene.

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2009)

The Graduate (1967)
Dustin Hoffman is beyond astonishing here. I mean, everyone is great in their parts, and the older generation in the 1960s is captured too well for words, the falseness, the materialism. But young Hoffman as awkward, yearning Ben, with a foot in old and new generations (it's 1967 and he's no hippie, but he longs to break away), makes you really feel his entrapment, and his liberation by the end. And Anne Bancroft is easily his equal, as an actress, and her own entrapment as the well-to-do and unhappy Mrs. Robinson, and her ability to lever a way free, is also palpable. All of this is a marvel to watch.
It's so easy to like the plot of this film, some of the other innovations get lost, like the lighting, which is daring and beautiful with its willingness to avoid mere prettiness. When the father is scolding Ben in the pool, the sunlight glares behind his head. When Ben and Mrs. Robinson are in the hotel room, whole scenes go on in darkness and we only listen. The photography overall uses this lighting and extends the takes to an almost uncanny extent, so that conversations go on very long--many minutes--with seeming directorial ease (and therefore growing tension in the frame).
The writing, too, is masterful. The plot is wild enough for its time, or ours, and is handled with such matter of factness (old woman seducing a completely wile-less younger man, really now). But it's funny! Really really funny. Director Mike Nichols started as a comedian of course, partnered with Elaine Mays, and the subtle, deft handling of unlikely comebacks is both realistic and hilarious and fraught with anxiety. He's one of those directors who understands human interaction, dialog as well as silence, with vivid, subtle keenness (he made many other actor's films, the breathtaking Closer and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for starters). Nichols uses Hoffman most of all to lead us through the topsy turvy plot.
You can't forget the social commentary here, one of the best illustrations of a generation breaking free and the reasons why. It's about the generation gap, about finding what matters beyond materialism. It's about young people having enough money to not worry about survival. It's about true love without calculation, whatever the impulsiveness, and whatever the prospects of their success as a couple. And all of this is done without preachiness (notice the cross in the almost last scene) and without emotional distance. Remember, this was filmed while it was happening--the 60s are still unfinished, and their meaning undigested. There is, thankfully, no nostalgia.
I've seen this film several times over the years, but it has been awhile, and I was prepared to find holes in it, or a flagging pace, or something imperfect. And I didn't. Do I like Katherine Ross in particular as the girlfriend-to-be? Not really, but she's a type that makes sense for the year. Is the music plugged in and out logically or elegantly? Well, Simon and Garfunkle's attitude and introspection makes sense, adding to the mood perfectly, and it is fit into some of the scenes like a choreographed film score (as when the car runs out of gas). Fans will note that the versions of Mrs. Robinson are very different than the album releases. But songs are repeated, sometimes a lot, and you wonder exactly why.
But so what? These are the oddities that make the film more distinctive and, in a way, more memorable. Nichols, Bancroft, and Hoffman, the little known screenwriters, and veteran cameraman Robert Surtees have made a film I'm sure is truly timeless.