Blu-ray: The Graduate

Can a film’s classic status expire, or be rescinded? If it can, I’d say The Graduate is a potential candidate.

Yes, it was formally groundbreaking (within the context of American cinema), and is often read as a metaphor for the clash of generations, the burgeoning freedoms and battles for equality being waged as the 60s reacted against the grey flannel stultification of the 50s. But try watching it back to back with, say, Bonnie and Clyde, and some aspects come across today as surprisingly staid, almost atavistic. 

Roger Ebert labelled Dustin Hoffman’s Ben Braddock an “insufferable creep”. That’s harsh, but I’d go along with calling him “a tiresome bore”. Hoffman’s star-making performance is justifiably lauded, yet there's a fine line between underplaying and underwhelming. His character presents as opaque, verging on catatonic. 

If James Dean’s Jim Stark seemed genuinely tormented in Rebel Without a Cause – his father wearing a pinafore probably didn’t help, to be fair – here Hoffman’s Ben just seems performatively alienated. There’s a strong sense that he’d benefit enormously from a good slap. He tells his parents he wants his future to be “different”; the irony is, in exhibiting such adolescent ennui, fancying himself as unique for not knowing what he wants to do with his life, he’s as clichéd and conformist as any ticky-tacky careerist.

As for the ick factor, it seems not to have been much of an issue back in 1967. Anne Bancroft’s middle-aged Mrs Robinson having a manipulative sexual relationship with a boy half her age, appears to have been phlegmatically accepted as just a plot device. 

And, again, perhaps it got a pass not only due to the older lover being female rather than male, but also because it was conceived as in keeping with the sexual freedoms of the era. If the film were released today, in our post-Me Too, social media hothouse environment, there would likely be more controversy. None of the extras on the Blu-ray, including The Graduate at 25, a making-of doc from 1992, or the commentary track with Steven Soderbergh and Mike Nichols, even mention the problematic nature of the age gap. Nichols does have interesting points to make, though, about sex as anger, and how women who “are like guys about sex” are more common now not due to gender shifts but to societal ones.

Equally, your view on such matters doubtless varies significantly depending on what stage of life you’re at. I loved the film when I first saw it as a teenager, subconsciously identifying with Ben’s rebarbative attitudes. “Two TV sets and two Cadillac cars, they ain’t gonna help you at all.” Also, the titillating elements probably chimed with the young man’s stereotypical fantasies about “the older woman”, by whom you’d be delighted to be exploited: as Ebert wrote, Ben gets “to sleep with the ranking babe in his neighborhood”. Today, I’m less inclined to see Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson as predatory. She lights a fire in Ben, but ends up getting her expensively manicured fingers burned. In fact, she’s the emotional heart of the film: a beautiful, worldly and intelligent woman trapped in a loveless, soul-destroying suburban marriage. Here’s to her.

Much is made of the film being thematically simpatico with the Sixties, but those claims are difficult to evidence. What would really change if the film was set in the 50s? Not much. Nichols even notes how college previews went badly because students couldn’t stomach the fact that it ignored the Vietnam War. Simon and Garfunkel’s music was used in a truly innovative way, not least in the bravura montage sequence set to April Come She Will. But the themes explored in those songs are handled more subtly, and less sophomorically, than in the film they bolster (and have become associated with).

As ever with Criterion, the transfer is superb; I’ve never seen the film look anywhere near this good, certainly not on the older DVD versions. Is this a truly great film? It is in its first half, where form seems to embody meaning: it’s propulsive, seductive and daringly edited. It’s a feast for the eyes: the direction, cinematography, and production design are phenomenal. The colour palette is gorgeous; the driving sequences (in “that little red wop job” sports car) are mesmerising. 

It’s full of strong, characterful performances, although Anne Bancroft is so coruscatingly great she threatens to throw everyone else into deep shade. And like the central affair itself, the film falls apart in its second act. Ben's sudden passion for Mrs Robinson’s goody two shoes daughter Elaine stretches credulity to breaking point. As does the suggestion that a happy relationship is possible when one party has slept with their partner’s mother. 

Ben’s obsessive pursuit of Elaine might today qualify as stalking, and the absence of emotional spark in their relationship is exacerbated by Katharine Ross’s screen presence: luminously attractive but at times almost as affectless as Hoffman’s Ben. 

The ending is sometimes considered happy, but for me, it’s ambivalent at best, and (spoiler alert) Elaine absconding with Ben minutes after marrying her blue-eyed, parent-friendly, pipe-smoking suitor, rather than embodying rebellion or liberation, is surely no less ill-advised and star-crossed than Ben’s affair with Mrs Robinson. Elaine thinks she’s avoiding her mother’s fate – but will she?

This is an excellent Blu-ray, loaded with fascinating bonus features. The film itself, though, is flawed and a little muddled. Its freshness has wilted a fair bit, over the years. And it comes with a clutch of trigger warnings. Put it in the pantry with the cupcakes.

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