The Graduate
1967 · Directed by Mike Nichols
Original language: English
- drama
- romance
- comedy
The story
A disillusioned college graduate finds himself torn between his older lover and her daughter.
What it’s like
Cool, deadpan unease wrapped in sunny Southern California: pool-blue and sun-faded Los Angeles suburbs, pale stucco, hazy afternoons, and the glassy calm of a Mrs. Robinson's house where the air-conditioning seems to hum louder than anyone speaks. Director Mike Nichols frames people in tight, awkward two-shots and long, uneasy pauses, with the camera lingering on Dustin Hoffman's stiff, blank-faced drifting as much as on the room around him. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's songs drift through the score, folk melancholy set against the ticking of a stalled life. The pace is languid and self-conscious, comic in its embarrassments yet slowly darkening into anxiety about what adulthood will demand. Sex is present and suggestive, with brief nudity and a few charged, sultry scenes but nothing explicit; violence is absent, and the tension is social rather than physical. The emotional arc follows a bewildered young man drifting into compromise and then toward a restless, uncertain choice. Suited to a late-night, half-lit watch for viewers who enjoy satirical, sardonic coming-of-age stories with a mood of quiet, wry dread.
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