FILM 67/68

 am beginning to think that the most pernicious phrase of our age is that well-known battle cry, "Never trust anyone over 30." Personally, I couldn't care less if the little chaps don't trust me because I don't trust them either. But I notice a growing tendency among my fellow fuds -- especially the artists and intellectuals -- to try to ingratiate themselves with their adolescent critics by agreeing with them, and that disturbs me. There is something undignified -- not to say masochistic -- about one's deciding not to trust his own generation. In effect he is declaring that he does not trust himself, and I submit that the quality that best characterizes our time is not the revolt of our youth but the supine acquiescence of so many elders in that revolt. I regard this not only as disloyal to our own not-totally-dishonorable histories but unhelpful to the kids themselves, who need a strongminded, but not rigid, older generation against which to test themselves.

The occasion for these geriatric musings is The Graduate, a film which starts out to satirize the alienated spirit of modern youth, does so with uncommon brilliance for its first half, but ends up selling out to the very spirit its creators intended to make fun of. Its protagonist, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), is introduced as the archetype of youthful angst, a sensitive lad whose collegiate triumphs in academics, athletics, and campus activities fill his parents with delicious pride and fill him with an equally delicious disgust. By rights, his passage into the world of bourgeois striving should be smooth, but he loathes the whole idea of getting and spending. The more the adults around him urge him to take his first brisk strides toward success, the deeper he sinks into a swoon on despair, the style of which is borrowed from certain 19th-century Russian novelists -- a style that could not contrast more comically with the setting of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, preoccupied with sports cars, swimming pools and other sunlit status symbols the awfulness of which director Mike Nichols catches with such wicked assurance.

Poor Ben. It is basic sex that undoes his enjoyable ennui. A determined young man can resist almost anything, but if his first seducer is an older woman (the wife of his father's partner, no less), he doesn't have a chance. His attempts to keep his cool when subjected to the consuming heat Anne Bancroft generates is hilariously pathetic, and the way he zigs when she zags will put you in mind of the best skits Mr. Nichols used to do with Elaine May. Mr. Hoffman is the master of the infinite variety of soulful states, half-finished thoughts and phrases, and of a wonderfully wheezy expulsion of breath that occurs whenever he is up tight, which is most of the time. His sureness of insight is delivered with such technical precision that I have no hesitation in calling it the year's most significant screen debut. Would that everyone connected with the film shared his sense of where he is and where he is going.

But once the May-September affair is established, things start to go wrong. Ben falls in love with his mistress's daughter (the lovely Katharine Ross), understandably upsetting her Mom and causing a slightly sour stench to start pervading the comedy. We pass over the line separating farce from potential tragedy as Nichols and the scriptwriters, Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, try to compensate by subtly shifting their attitude toward Ben.

From anti- or at least non-hero he suddenly starts to emerge as a romantic hero of the unhyphenated variety. Oh, he still fumbles and mumbles and trips all over himself, but the emotional distance from which we previously viewed him -- a distance absolutely essential for satire -- suddenly disappears. We find ourselves asked to stand shoulder to sympathetic shoulder with him as he attempts to rescue his (young) lady love from living death -- marriage to a square.

The movie loses its shrewd. Sentiment replaces even-handed toughness, and there is an attempt to force our acknowledgment of Ben's final superiority over environment and elders. He is likable enough, and they are indeed ghastly. But he is also desperately self-absorbed and shamelessly spoiled. And, while his is seen to strike the poses of exquisite sensitivity and sensibility, nothing in his talk or actions seems to substantiate his right to criticize, withdraw, or revolt from the society in which he has yet to take a man's place. The failure of Nichols and company to insist on this proof strikes me as a fatal defect in artistic -- not to mention social -- responsibility.

We are distracted from this shortcoming by a succession of gags that ill-suit the darkening mood of the film's last half and which, unlike the preceding humor, have no organic connection with character or situation. The true tensions generated by the generation gap are thus avoided and, along with them, the deepest comic possibilities as well. It's a shame -- they were halfway to something wonderful when they skidded on a patch of greasy kid stuff.

- Richard Schickel, Life, Jan. 19, 1968.