New Hollywood pioneer Mike Nichols wryly lampoons the paper-thin facade of the perfect nuclear family in this comedy classic.
Filmmaker
Mike Nichols was one of the early progenitors of the
American New Wave - also known as New Hollywood - in the late 1960s, and
The Graduate is a perfect stamp of its era: from its effervescent cinematography (as exciting new color photography technology became readily accessible to an eager young generation of filmmakers anxious to prove themselves as New Waves in Europe and Japan surged and re-wrote the rules of filmmaking); to its experimental camerawork and storytelling devices (the summer-of-love/summer-of-nothing montage is one of my favorite sequences in film and always makes me shake my head, grin, and say “god I love movies”); to its music score from a rising folk duo known as
Simon & Garfunkel; to its rebellious, unconventional characters who challenge the status quo and the romanticized ideologies of the past.
Benjamin Braddock, played by
Dustin Hoffman, is one of those unconventional characters: a recent college graduate, from an affluent family, with no friends, no aspirations, nowhere to go, and a complete disconnect from the world around him. Wide-eyed and aimless, trapped and disillusioned, Braddock finds release when he enters into an adulterous affair with a friend of his parents’, Mrs. Robinson, but when her daughter Elaine comes home for the summer, Braddock ends the affair to pursue Elaine instead.
#ItGetsMessy
Nichols uses the story, adapted from the 1963
novel by
Charles Webb, to humorously and insightfully explore the expanding generational gap during an especially tumultuous, zeitgeist-shifting period in the United States, as the facade-like dreams of the 50s, promising a flawless nuclear family and a faultless country, began to fade.
I’m also 100% certain that
The Graduate could be re-cut into a really unnerving psychological thriller. Braddock quickly goes from relatable, if somewhat pitiable, to a creepy, unhinged, obsessive stalker, which I suppose is right in line with New Hollywood’s fondness for occasionally sympathetic, but not terribly likable “protagonists”. New Hollywood filmmakers, in the same vein as
film-noir, opted to reflect all aspects of society, rather than idolize the idealistic pretenses set up by Classic Hollywood.
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