Back to School

It's considered by many to be director Mike Nichols' greatest film. It put Dustin Hoffman on the map. It's in the top 10 on the AFI's 100 Films list, and in the top 250 over at IMDb. In short, no movie could live up to the hype lavished on The Graduate. But I wasn't prepared for just how far short it fell.

To me, there are two key factors that make The Graduate an underwhelming movie. One is simply the passage of time. Though it may not be the movie's fault, this just shows its age in almost every frame. The very premise of the film is of a college graduate who doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. Alright, so that's a fairly timeless notion. But he falls into a relationship with an older, married woman -- his first relationship with any woman. That right there is where the times feel like they've left this movie far behind.

It's no coincidence that when more recent films have deliberately tried to ape this "Mrs. Robinson" story, they always shave four or five years off the young man's age, turning him into a high school student. The "no direction in life" story still works -- at any age, really -- but the "falling in with someone much older" just doesn't work for a young twenty-something anymore. It's not that unusual, not surprising or shocking... it's just not enough of a hook to build the whole movie around.

The other main flaw in this story is that the young man eventually ends his affair to pursue the woman's age-appropriate daughter. And here's a flaw that was baked into the movie at the time: the girl is just plain boring. Mrs. Robinson, as played by Anne Bancroft, is alluring, compelling, and seductive. You can see why young Benjamin Braddock would be taken in, and stay in the relationship for a long time.

By contrast, daughter Elaine, as played by Katharine Ross, is wooden, unexciting, and flat. Her character is only developed to the point where it seems like her "function" in the plot is to make Benjamin confront the reality of just how much older Mrs. Robinson is -- she has a daughter his age! Then, improbably, this shallow character is meant to be taken as a love interest worthy of competing with this far more interesting character.

In short, it's just impossible to believe that he would leave the mother for the daughter. The only thing she has to commend her is that she's more age-appropriate, and is going to be more difficult to get precisely because of his entanglement with the mother.

And so to me, it makes the ending of the film ultimately a major disappointment. Spoilers, I suppose, if you haven't seen this 40+ year old film, but in the end, Benjamin steals the daughter away from a potential marriage to someone else, and the two run off together, fleeing an irate family. Given how boring she is, given the knowledge that the only real attraction here can be the danger of it all, it seems inevitable what the real conclusion to this tale would be, some time after the final reel rolls. These two end up miserable -- either together, in a never-ending relationship with no thrills, or leaving each other because it just didn't work out.

Do other people see this too when they see this movie? Is that why it's so highly praised -- that it's an unhappy ending disguised as a happy one? I wonder. I can't get over the fact that half the movie seems to be working at odds against the other half, which isn't doing that much to commend itself in the first place.

Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft both give good performances in the film, and that's about the best I can say of it. I rate the Graduate a D+, and rank it among the most disappointing of the "classics" I've ever sat down to watch.