“Benjamin Braddock is a real motherfucker — in more ways than one.
“In the first half of Mike Nichols’s 1967 generation-gap classic The Graduate, Braddock (played to awkward, nebbishy perfection by Dustin Hoffman) returns home after finishing college and stumbles around in a nagging, ennui-fueled daze, ducking from responsibilities and trying to keep impending adulthood at bay. (Since this is the ‘60s, the music of Simon and Garfunkel follows him wherever he goes.) So, it’s no wonder he accepts the seductive advances of older family friend Mrs. Robinson (damn — Anne Bancroft had it going on back in the day!), as they both slink away to a hotel and have an ongoing dalliance.
“That immediately gets shaken up when Mrs. Robinson’s lovely daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) returns home from college and Benjamin, at his parents’ behest, reluctantly goes on a date with her. Of course, the forever-confused Braddock takes a shine to Miss Robinson, which Mrs. Robinson obviously disapproves.
“He eventually breaks the news to Elaine that he and her mom had a fling, which of course, like, destroys the family. But instead of realizing it would be best if Braddock severed all ties with the Robinson clan, he spends the second half of the movie stalking Elaine, even following her back to school, getting a room at a nearby boarding house (run by a pre-Three’s Company Norman Fell!) and pressuring her into dumping her current boyfriend and marrying him.
“For a movie whose iconic poster made audiences think they were getting some hot younger guy-on-older girl action, The Graduate is deceptively more conservative than counterculture. With Calder Willingham and Buck Henry drolly adapting Charles Webb’s 1963 novel, Nichols basically takes a time-honored male fantasy — getting both the girl and her hot mom — and shows how horrible an idea that is when it plays out in the real world. Also, it makes the argument that if you’re into that shit, you’re kind of a sociopath.
“Although The Graduate is a movie where the two main characters are morally bankrupt, your age bracket will ultimately determine where your sympathy lies. When I first saw this in my horny, impressionable youth, I thought Mrs. Robinson was a grade-A beeyotch for keeping young lovers Benjamin and Elaine apart. Now that I’m middle-aged and bitter as hell, I find myself sympathizing more with Mrs. Robinson. (Even the late Roger Ebert felt the same way.) She’s no saint, but she was a lonely, alcoholic gal in a loveless marriage looking for a tryst. Unfortunately, she chose the wrong paramour in Braddock, who — as the movie progresses — becomes less of a hero and more of an agent of chaos. Instead of learning from his mistakes, he creates more when he pursues Elaine, ultimately (SPOILERS) ‘rescuing’ her from her wedding day by whisking her away and hopping on a bus to, um, somewhere. But, as the final, lingering images of those two kids reveal, even they are wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into. (Am I the only one who thinks Braddock might’ve evolved into the marriage-destroying protagonist Charles Grodin plays in The Heartbreak Kid — directed by Nichols’s former comedy partner Elaine May?)
“By satirically killing two birds with one stone — slyly taking jabs at both bored, middle-class suburbanites and their children, aka the spoiled, then-aimless baby boomers — The Graduate became an influential, box-office smash that launched the careers of both its stars and its director (who eventually won a Best Director Oscar). It also made a lot of young idiots fresh outta college think they could land older chicks in their neighborhood. ~ Craig D. Lindsey
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