When is the graduate set

In the end, of course, Ben rescues Elaine from the premature old age that Carl represents. Note, again, that apart from bride and groom there appear to be virtually no young folk at the wedding—Elaine is essentially marrying into the Planet of the Old People.

Elaine flees the altar, despite having already married Carl, and she and Ben hop a bus to get out of there. The new, highly dubious couple is, belatedly if appropriately, terrified. Loathing the present is a far cry from having any idea how to build a better future.

I love The Graduate. It is, to me, a perfect film. No shot is wasted. Every moment is deliberate. The film is set in the late s, and the soundtrack is decidedly of that moment, but everything else about it feels stuck in the late s. There is no pot-smoking or protesting. Benjamin Braddock is clean-cut and clean shaven—we actually see him shaving in multiple scenes. He often wears a tie. Even the drive-up hamburger joint where Benjamin and Elaine go after their first date has a decidedly Tab Hunter vibe to it.

Maybe all this is by design. The moment at the burger stand underscores how Benjamin was already hopeless against any effort to avoid turning out just like his cocktail-generation parents. The Charles Webb novel that The Graduate was based on was written in , but still. Even the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack, while technically mid-to-late 60s, is really a form of throwback music. One of their principal influences was the Everly Brothers; the two duos even toured together in the early s.

The way young people and older people can have of talking past each other, of willfully misunderstanding each other, even of battling each other—a dynamic the movie so deftly captures.

One of the things I appreciate about The Graduate is how horribly hermetic Nichols et al. Here, though, L. That plane. That pool. That fish tank. That diving suit, with its ridiculous flippers smacking awkwardly on the kitchen floor. Possibilities foreclosed. A self-absorption that is so all-encompassing that it never occurs to anyone involved to question or attempt to correct it.

This universe is small, and solipsism reigns. Chris, you mentioned how the movie falls apart in its second half, and I so deeply agree.

And those motivations … make no sense at all. Like, truly, none. She goes on one horrible-and-insulting-but-then-better-because-burgers? I could definitely be missing something. Maybe, sure, all the absurdity is the point. Maaaaaaaybe The Graduate is a kind of pre— Breaking Bad Breaking Bad : a good guy slowly transformed into an agent of chaos, the transformation propelled not by financial need, but by its opposite.

The movie seems, itself, thoroughly Team Ben—despite his moral descent, and maybe even because of it. The film that is named for him gives Ben everything he wanted.

It asks basically nothing of him in return, save for a lot of car-driving and flop-sweating. And: It turns Elaine into a stooge, robbed of reason and agency. Robinson—which, Team Ebert again. The violin the audience is being asked to play here is so very, very small. Resents the establishment, and fights back by conforming.

Orr: I find myself caught between your two poles of outright Graduate -love and Ebert-y disdain. I find the first two-thirds of the movie genuinely brilliant but, as noted, feel it falls apart badly in the final act—like you, Megan, largely because nothing Elaine Robinson does makes a lick of sense. Robinson from being a complex and fascinating character. Then ultimately she lets her parents make the decision for her what is she, 9?

She seems devoid of even the slightest hint of agency, literally inclined to do whatever the last male character to speak to her tells her to do. Not to throw stones unnecessarily, but the failures of the character are exacerbated by the fact that Ross is simply not a good actress.

Braddock in his campaign to get Benjamin together with his daughter. Benjamin jokingly brings the subject up with Mrs. Benjamin, consummately rude, takes her to a cheap strip joint for a drink. After trying to be pleasant for both of them, Elaine rushes out in tears. When he drives her home, much later than he had expected to, neither wants to end the evening.

The only place around that is still open turns out to be the hotel that Benjamin has been using for his assignations with Mrs. Back in the car, Elaine asks him if he is having an affair with someone. When he demurs at her demand that he never see Elaine again, she threatens to tell all. Robinson, drenched and haggard-looking, appears in the doorway behind him. Elaine gets the picture and shrieks at him to get out.

Benjamin keeps an eye on her from a distance until she goes back to school, then stews around home for a couple of weeks longer. One day, he announces to his parents that he has decided to marry Elaine, and drives up to Berkeley, where he takes a furnished room and continues to shadow her.

After days of espionage, he accosts her on a bus, pretending, with no particular conviction, that he has run into her by accident. Elaine, who is on her way to meet a date at the zoo, converses with him icily. Benjamin doggedly tags along until her date, a blond medical student named Carl Smith, gives him the old brushoff. Benjamin tries inarticulately to straighten her out; she screams him down.

Late that night, she appears again, and asks for a kiss. Benjamin proposes marriage. After several days of indecision, she tentatively agrees.

Then Mr. Too much shouting. The landlord, who took Benjamin for an agitator from the start, orders him out. Elaine has disappeared from her dormitory.

On his way to the church, he runs out of gas. He races the remaining distance on foot, and reaches a glass-enclosed balcony of the church just as the young Smiths are completing their vows.

She sees him and, for a protracted moment, walks blankly up the aisle toward him. Then she cries out to him, and everyone springs into action. Benjamin gallops down the stairs, Mr. Robinson runs to the rear of the church to head him off, Elaine fights her way through the crowd, everybody starts screaming. In the melee that ensues, Benjamin elbows Mr.

He bars the door with the cross, locking the entire wedding party inside. The two of them—Benjamin grubby from his three-day chase, Elaine immaculate in her bridal gown—run, grinning wildly, across the broad church lawn and hail a passing bus.

The last shots show them sitting exhausted and expressionless in the rear seat, oblivious of the stares of their fellow-passengers. Robinson—arise from the question: What is Benjamin going to do with himself? Mike Nichols, the director, handles its exposition boldly, and we are given every reason to expect that what the movie will try to do is answer it. In more general terms, the first part of the film seems to be asking what it means to be a promising young man in America today.

What does it add up to now, in this country, to be twenty-one, with a high-quality education behind you and a brilliant future ahead of you? Naturally gifted, with a family of wealth and position to back him up, an impressive degree, a fellowship award, the ability to excel in almost any career he might choose, Benjamin exists, as the film opens, in that condition of voluptuous potentiality which is supposed to define young men. The condition fills him with anguish and confusion. The shared assumptions about what one will do with oneself no longer hold together.

We could no longer be taken with a young man who stood smiling confidently upon the threshold of his future as a doctor or a businessman. For Benjamin to make their youthful hopes his own would be preposterous. A son can pursue ambitions that his parents cherished and failed to fulfill but not ambitions that they fulfilled and then found wanting.

Upon his arrival home, he finds himself surrounded by fawning adults who have, in a way that escapes them, made a mess of their lives.

He sees himself on the threshold only of making a mess of his own life. My kid should have it so good! Even though Benjamin is in a position to accomplish no more, really, than they have accomplished, the guests claw at him hungrily. That must be the opposite of the word! Parents who are in life as intellectually vulgar as the Braddocks urged their children to go to the movie and see how lucky they were. Braddock stands for nothing readily impugnable; he simply fails to stand for anything worthy of respect.

The film condemns him because he is not a fit model, and because his ambitions for his son are misguided. Indeed, no one gives Benjamin any sense of direction, much less inspiration.

Had there been a single great teacher—or, for that matter, a great hanger-on—back at his nameless Eastern college, he would not be quite so mopily lost. His adulthood looks bleak largely because his environment offers no decent ideal of adulthood—not even a clue to what that ideal might be. We know that an entanglement with a married woman—especially one so awful—can come to no good end, and that the movie, in order to resolve itself, is going to have to get Benjamin out of it and into something else.

Mechanical sex—a bitchy adultery—is as indispensable to the vacuous suburban scene as a few tall, cool ones hoisted over the hibachi.

Robinson might be his emblem for the plastic world. Benjamin knows he can devote no attention to mapping out his life as long as he has her to deal with. The question we expect the final third to answer is something like: Will Benjamin find his way back to his initial dilemma, come to terms with it at last, and resolve it?

Or, at least, we would expect such a question if we could halt the progress of the film until we were ready to proceed, the way we lay a book down on our lap to mull over what has happened and anticipate what is to come.

For this reason, we must replay movies or their most interesting parts, anyway in our minds, and judge them largely in retrospect. Marshall McLuhan might dismiss all this as clinging to linear-text methodologies, but I think most people go over movies this way. A number of film critics, one gathers, try to perform the same mental operations while they are actually watching a film. Not only can they not do it; they keep missing more.

Many films mellow in leisurely recollection; perhaps a fine film must. The final third, in which the best scenes occur, is able to preoccupy us only as long as light is still flickering on the screen. Just when we have greeted Elaine as the catalytic agent to extricate Benjamin from his distracting entanglement with her mother, just when we have braced ourselves for a renewed confrontation with his future, the film, hurtling relentlessly onward, places terrible obstacles between Benjamin and Elaine.

Suddenly, we see him behaving like a man of absolute purpose—a man who knows what he wants and fights for it. Suddenly, he is overflowing with energy and sense of direction. After moping aimlessly through two-thirds of the picture, he is transformed, through his pursuit of Elaine, into the conventional man, resolved upon his chase. On these terms, his success is assured. Despite its bizarre antecedents, the last few hundred feet of the film have a healthy American quality: Benjamin and his girl racing across a green lawn, he in his chinos and stained windbreaker, weary with work well done, and she in her lovely white wedding dress, looking so pure.

And she is pure, as far as we know—the first pure flesh amid the plastic. However unnatural what led up to it may have been, they will have a proper wedding night! The clambering onto the bus filled with good common folk. Off on their honeymoon! Sitting in the bus there?

Are you going to try and make something nasty out of that? The pace of the film is swift and smooth, but its emotional progress—its movement toward resolution—is deeply illogical. The ending does answer the question: How will Benjamin get to marry Elaine, whom he loves? At one level, the film proceeds awkwardly, deceptively, through a series of less and less interesting problems, sidestepping difficulties of its own authorship, until it can solve only the least interesting of them.

All that remains when the bus drives Benjamin and Elaine off into a presumably roseate adulthood is the bare convention of young love triumphant. The trials that Benjamin seemed to forget once he had fixed upon getting the girl, we, too, are encouraged to forget. The book is peculiarly spare for a long piece of fiction, reading more like a scenario treatment than a novel. Nothing about her presents a good reason for his falling in love with her.

The novel, in dialogue that is omitted from the film, makes this abundantly clear at a number of points. For example:. The affair—the preliminary relationship—has been pictured in endless detail; now the love that promises salvation is treated skimpily. Nichols cannot let us leave the theatre feeling that nothing has changed, so he gives us what he thinks we want by packing the last thirty minutes with passages of tremendous emotional power.

The passages begin when Benjamin finds Mr. Their tension has to do with the horror of confronting brute, implacable stupidity— wrongheadedness —in others. With the over-obvious exception of Benjamin, people all appear to see the world so wackily that, like Benjamin, we have no idea what would be involved in getting them to see it straight.

The adults will sacrifice him, and sacrifice Elaine, too. There is no reasoning with them. If he lit into the congregation without the perfect rationale of self-defense, the scene would appear vengeful, even sadistic. The scene takes on overtones of Jesus driving the moneylenders from the temple. An author must manipulate his plot skillfully to legitimize so impermissible a release.

Webb swung into his most dramatic pose:. Robinson drove in toward him and grabbed him around the waist. Benjamin twisted away, but before he could reach Elaine he felt Mr. Robinson grabbing at his neck and then grabbing at the collar of his shirt and pulling him backward and ripping the shirt down his back.

He spun around and slammed his fist into Mr. Robinson reeled backward and crumpled into a corner. Nichols has muted the smash to the face into an elbow to the solar plexus, but Mr. Robinson still lands senseless on the floor, and the scene begins to build to an Oedipal jubilee.

If Benjamin could have handled the situation in any other way, or if he had really injured Mr. Robinson or had killed him , Nichols might have led his young audiences to feel the guilt that lies just beyond, and sometimes mingles with, triumph. Benjamin arrives after —instead of, as in the novel and in previous films, before—the ceremony is over. Marry me! We know what is real! Then Nichols craftily steps outside the convention. Where Morgan hurts and humiliates no one but himself, Benjamin, like an Ivy League Douglas Fairbanks, outmaneuvers and routs the hostile wedding party.

And when he starts swinging the cross like a battle-axe they go wild. Like Benjamin, he would have to have no choice but the ordinarily forbidden. When they finally escape their tormentors, and the tension of the chase is relaxed, our relief is consummate. They stare blankly ahead, because at last things have stopped happening at a preoccupying clip. Now they have a chance to consider the momentous consequences of what they have done, and the difficulties that lie ahead.

This final moment of thoughtfulness—Nichols has painstakingly established the use of full-screen expressionless faces to indicate thought and emotion—lessens only slightly the exuberant tone of his finale.

What, after all, is Benjamin going to do with his life? Do we infer from the vigor of his pursuit, and from the conventionality of Elaine, that they will soon be discussing a mortgage on a split-level in Tarzana? Or are these clues illusory? Will Benjamin now, with Elaine in tow, return to grapple with the confusions that unsettled him before the Robinson ladies turned up? Indeed, Nichols recently told a group of college-newspaper editors that as the movie ends, the real problems are just beginning we must assume that Benjamin somehow needed Elaine before he could face them , and that the marriage would never work out.

At worst, he has fixed upon her as a distraction, exactly as he fixed upon her mother. The condition of being altogether lost may be unbearable; it is understandable that people usually take false roads out. For an artist to detour onto such roads is also understandable, I suppose; in any event, it happens often enough.

Resisting the lure of such detours and remaining still, in stark perplexity, to watch and listen is the nerviest course, in art as in life. Benjamin's landlord, Mr. McCleery, complains about how he doesn't like those "outside agitators" and suspects Ben of being one.

During the 60s, there were a fair number of anti-war activists on college campuses who weren't members of the student body. That's who the landlord was referring to. The Graduate 's version of Southern California is focused on the rich, preppy areas.

We don't really see a broader cross-section of L. Ben's father is an attorney who can afford to buy Ben an expensive sports car for a graduation gift. His male friends are professional people and their wives are traditional housewives. The character of Mrs. Robinson shows us the underside of this glittering life; the price she paid for being the wife of a wealthy attorney was the abandonment of her own dreams and interests.

Even though the film spends some time on the Berkeley campus, there are no signs of hippies or banners or political demonstrations, which would have probably been going on daily in Ben and Elaine, although they're planning their own personal rebellion, don't identify with that.