Want to Know About Uncertainty? Ask Benjamin

Rating: 8/10 (22 December 2005)

Who is the Graduate? He's every person on that narrow thread of time after school is over and adult work has yet to begin. I could really identify with Ben (Hoffman) when I was on the verge of graduating from college: I was staring into an abyss, an uncertain path which might go anywhere or nowhere; it was a scary prospect. This doesn't apply to those who have mapped out their next 10 years after college with icy precision. No, this is about indecision, lack of confidence, uncertainty - all applicable to Ben's character. It was why this picture was such a huge success, with young people, with older viewers curious to see their past or their kids' perspectives; Hoffman, though quite a bit older than a college joe when he played this role, easily captured the sense of uncertain youth, of a kid still a kid though suddenly expected to behave like a man. He gets a crash course on methods of being a man courtesy of Mrs. Robinson (Bancroft). It's too much too soon, but it sure unstuck him from a slog through extended childhood, and the other reason for the huge success. Back then, an older woman getting it on with such a young punk was unheard of - scandalous, really.
The movie isn't perfect, nowhere near it: there are too many languid portions with that Simon-Garfunkel song piping in yet again. Unless you're a fanatic for their stuff, it wears thin by the 2nd half of the film. But it's this particular picture which made me realize how truly artistic a film can be, by comparison to most of the drivel released in the eighties, nineties and so on. I think this was only Nichol's 2nd film, but he laced it with suggestion and framing unheard of in later decades. There's the jungles just outside the nice housing in the background, the animal stripes on the woman in foreground; there she is, she's the predator and Hoffman is her unwary prey. The water motif, of being stuck, surrounded, suffocating - Hoffman at the bottom of the pool, his one brief escape from reality. Bancroft, tending to appear in frame as a reflection - is she a dream or a nightmare; both, of course. All the actors are close to perfect, including character actor Hamilton as the wronged but slimy Mr. Robinson; my favorite scene is when he confronts Ben in Ben's apartment near the end and calls him all those names, and Norman Fell appears looking befuddled as usual. And in the very end, Ben and his girl (Ross, her best role) are still on a road to nowhere, on a bus, of all things, a future very, very uncertain. The theme of the film holds true to the end. None of those pat Hollywood endings of the eighties and nineties. And so on.