David Brinkley's Journal
WHAT'S WRONG WITH "THE GRADUATE"

Young people love this movie and its James Dean-like hero,
Dustin Hoffman, because it puts down parents as
immoral clods. But TV's most articulate critic considers
The Graduate a caricature, misrepresenting both generations.

ne night at our house my son and several of his college-age friends found themselves in heated argument. They thought The Graduate was absolutely the best movie they ever saw, and so I went to see it to find out why they liked it so much.

Well, it was far from the best movie I ever saw and, except for a few minutes at the beginning, I thought it was pretty bad. But it seemed they liked it because it said about the parents and others what they would have said about us if they had made the movie themselves -- that we are self-centered and materialistic, that we are licentious and deeply hypocritical about it, that we try to make them into walking advertisements for our own affluence, our own vanities draped around their necks like garlands of rancid marigolds.

These are harsh judgments. I wonder how often they are true.

In the movie, a boy named Benjamin comes home from college to find his parents have invited friends -- their friends, not his -- to a party where he is to be put on display and congratulated for his academic and athletic triumphs. It turns out these upper-middle-class, lower-middle-age friends, in their forced and alcoholic cheer, don't even know what his triumphs were, and are vastly interested in themselves and in him hardly at all.

There is a scene where the father, with unknowing brutality, uses Benjamin, browbeating him into a hideously embarrassing little performance, forcing him to come out to the swimming pool in a new skindiving outfit, its price loudly announced, and then to make him flounder into the pool for the raucous amusement of the father's guests.

These episodes are shrewdly and effectively developed, and even though the picture thereafter stumbles into confusion, it persuades a college-age audience that Benjamin's furies are their furies.

With our black arts of communications and phrasemongering, yet another musty commonplace has now been made to appear a glittering discovery because it is impaled on the point of a vivid phrase.

The enduring conflicts between parents and children have now, suddenly, been phrasemongered into something called The Generation Gap.

A parent and a child are of two different orders of being. The age difference is only the least of it. One gives, one gets. One is independent, one dependent. One is experienced, one is not. One is looking toward finishing his work, one has yet to begin. One has many responsibilities, one has none. One grew up in depression and war, one in vast prosperity and mainly in peace. One grew up with Franklin Roosevelt and Benny Goodman, the other with Eisenhower, Kennedy and The Beatles. How could they ever understand each other?

We knew all this before we knew the new phrase and before The Graduate put up there on the screen a caricature of this classic conflict.

Parents as phony and cruel as these would never get, nor even deserve, a son's understanding; and a son coming out of college as dumb, awkward, and inarticulately self-pitying as Benjamin would have trouble holding theirs.

All that is new about The Generation Gap is the phrase itself. And, in spite of the enthusiasm for it among the young, it seems to me The Graduate only makes a few exaggerated points about familiar facts of life and then slides into the kind of frantic nonsense Mack Sennett would have made if he had the money.

- David Brinkley, Ladies Home Journal