The Graduate

Grade: A-

For someone who talks and writes about movies more than any other single subject, including physics, which I am studying in a PhD program, I have a lot of major movie blind spots. As I write this, I still haven’t seen some of what people consider the best movies of all time, movies like Lawrence of Arabia, Schindler’s List, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Last week, however, I did manage to remove one very important entry from that list with The Graduate (1967).

The Graduate, from director Mike Nichols, was released almost fifty years ago now, but compared against its contemporaries, the film seems much newer. The premise, a disturbing love (or lust, perhaps) triangle between a burnt out recent college graduate, the much-older wife of his father’s business partner, and her daughter, seems riskier than normal for the time period. The film begins with Ben (Dustin Hoffman) returning home to Los Angeles after his graduation, jaded and empty, to a massive party in his honor that he didn’t want and in which he clearly doesn’t fit. Ben attempts to escape the party, and the seductive Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) corrals him into driving her home, where he finds himself in a compromising position. Though not immediately, Ben begins the affair, which proceeds until he falls for Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). From that point Ben becomes solely focused on winning her heart, and to a delusional level after she learns of his affair and leaves for school in Berkeley. The ending that follows is among the best I have ever seen.

The Graduate is considered a comedy, and very much is one, but you wouldn’t guess it at the start. The film opens with Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence, which is a great song but certainly not one with a humorous tone, playing over a long shot of Ben exiting an airport, mostly spent stationary on a moving walkway. It’s a potent intro. The humor begins to arise as Ben is forced to meet the partygoers. Each of them has something absurd to say to the graduate that seems simultaneously silly and an accurate example of shallow real-life conversation. The best example is, of course, the famous encounter with Mr. McGuire. That sort of sets the stage for the movie in general. The Graduate is secretly a farce, a subtle slapstick buried under enough reality to be taken partially seriously. And the serious issues that The Graduate tackles are themselves compelling.

Nichols won the Academy Award for best director with The Graduate, and it isn’t surprising when you see the remarkably creative way he uses sound and imagery, long shots and close shots, and distortion of time and reality in story-telling. He builds Ben’s disconnection from the world out of every single word and object. There’s a sequence coincident with the first consummation of the affair in which weeks pass by like rooms that Ben passes through, implying among other things the blurred nature of his life and how little he is doing with it.

Dustin Hoffman’s performance was particularly enjoyable, because it was wholly identifiable and irritating at the same time. He spends the first half of the film unwillingly subservient, and carries just the right amount of confusion, frustration, and reluctance to seem like the kid, thrust into adulthood without a plan, that he is. Whenever he isn’t getting pushed around by Mrs. Robinson, Mr. Robinson, or his parents, Ben does nothing but lie around or sit and stare. In the second half he becomes assertive, but caustically so. I noticed some interesting parallels between Ben and Travis Bickle from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, but while Bickle is literally alone, Ben is alone in a crowd, remaining aloof because no one seems to care what he has to say or think. It isn’t surprising that he becomes a creep as the story progresses.

An underlying theme of The Graduate is one more timeless than I, in my ignorance, ever realized. Returning from school, Ben is accosted with expectations that he’ll become a responsible grownup, but he has clearly realized the disappointing truth of graduation: life isn’t any different the day after than it was the day before. While I’d like to think I exert better judgment in general than Ben does in this movie, I must admit that I completely understand Ben’s lethargy and why he would be led into some of the rebellious actions he takes. That’s one of the things that makes the movie fit so well for me: I think a lot of people go to school as much to delay the inevitable adulthood as to get an education, and when it finally comes around, it is frequently unwelcome. Is it any wonder that I’m in grad school straight out of my Bachelor program?

I don’t really have any more to say about The Graduate here. I would praise various scenes, including the impeccable ending, but the details are better left to be seen onscreen than ruined by me. I’ve focused in on Ben as the obvious character to follow, but I’m sure there’s a world to be said about Mrs. Robinson that I might pick up on a second viewing. I’ll just conclude here by saying that if you have ever felt like rejecting adulthood and responsibility, this movie is for you, if only as a warning.

tl;dr: The Graduate’s message may be fifty years old, but it is quite possibly more relevant now than ever.

THX 1138

Grade: B

Even ignoring the disappointingly successful recent YA entries into dystopian fiction, in which the setting is no more than a vehicle for youth empowerment and angsty love triangles, the genre has always been a little problematic for me. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is still one of my favorite books, but past that and a couple other exceptional installments, dystopias all kinda look the same. It’s hard to find anything that really feels original.

George Lucas’s feature-length directorial debut, THX 1138 (1971), initially seems like yet another clone, a hybrid of Orwell and Huxley. Mood-controlling drugs? Check. All-seeing cameras? Check. Suppressed individualism and sexuality? Check. Mindless entertainment? Check. The story itself, in synopsis, doesn’t really stand out either. One cog in the system, designated THX 1138 (Robert Duvall), though we might as well call him Winston Smith or Guy Montag, decides to disobey and pays the consequences. On the surface it all seems like it’s been done before.

But as you get into it, THX 1138 manages to develop its individuality, and ironically so when you consider that it concerns a world without that concept. The premise differs from other dystopias in two principal ways.

First, while other dystopian stories seem highly concerned with preventing free thought and maintaining ignorance, THX 1138 presents a world that has progressed past that. There doesn’t seem to be nearly as much focus on suppressing subversion because the subjects of the system are past the point of considering it. They go from place to place and task to task like robots. Their society is essentially a giant self-preserving computer, and humans are designated not by name but by an alphanumeric code. The fact that the movie takes place almost entirely in claustrophobic corridors and rooms adds to the sensation that the humans are just a part of a big machine.

The second, and more important, distinguishing trait of THX 1138 is that the society is inefficient, ineffective, and at times downright incompetent. While formal concepts of individuality are gone, the people clearly still yearn for something more than to be a cog, as Duvall expresses really well from the start. The androids that patrol the halls are constantly malfunctioning and administrative forces make occasionally disastrous bureaucratic mistakes. The big machine is far from well-oiled, and that fact actually works rather well for the story.

In technical terms, the movie accomplishes a lot with very little. The effects are minimal, but they always work. Unfortunately, in George Lucas’s director’s cut release in 2004, he “improved” a lot of them with his trademark style, the computer animation equivalent of vomiting all over the film, but where the old effects persist, they look great for their clearly rock-bottom budget. The movie is a feat of minimalism in exposition as well; no human bothers to explain what happens, and the viewer derives the story primarily from computerized voices and people behind the cameras, communicating with each other about the unfolding situation. This confused me at times, but I appreciated the overall effect and I would love to see other movies make more of an effort to avoid obvious expositional dialogue.

Regardless of the positive qualities of THX 1138, it is without a doubt a flawed film. Some scenes and concepts were bizarre; some nonsensical. There was a random shot of a lizard (to which Lucas’s later edit inexplicably added bug wings and moth antenna) sitting in some computer wires, which might have been further reference to the imperfection of the overall system, but it seemed pretty pointless to me. For some reason men and women live together as “mates” even though sex is prohibited, and THX’s mate comes to see him and have sex with him in the middle of an already strange imprisonment sequence. One of the imprisoned characters is erudite and philosophical without explanation among a group of people that don’t seem to have any kind of education beyond that in their trade. Details like this pop up throughout the film and make you wonder what Lucas was thinking.

All in all, the good points outweigh the bad for at least one viewing of THX 1138, and in particular the film is an outstanding example of minimalism. It stands out in almost comical contrast to what people tend to associate with George Lucas these days, and if you watch the 2004 director’s cut, you’ll see that contrast within the movie. And it’s worth it to sit through the film once just for a really fantastic end scene.

tl;dr: THX 1138 may be too weird for some, but it ties that weirdness together into a pretty impressive film.

Nebraska

Grade: A

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013) opens unassumingly on an old man (Woody Grant, played by Bruce Dern) walking along the side of a road, with no music or sound other than the passing cars. Nothing seems unusual until we see the man, still walking, on the freeway at the Billings, Montana city limits. He barely notices the policeman who stops him, and when the officer asks where he is going, he simply points away from Billings.

This is how the movie starts and it is a perfect example of the economy of storytelling present throughout. It only takes that brief scene to hook the viewer. We soon find that Woody is leaving Billings to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim the million dollar prize that he is convinced he has won through a Publishers Clearing House-style marketing scheme, and neither his son David (Will Forte) nor anyone else can convince him that it’s a scam. But even after you know exactly why Woody is leaving town, the opening scene sticks with you, because it gives a deep glimpse into the nature of Woody’s character. Woody continues to try to leave on foot, prompting David, who has his own purposes for leaving town for a couple days, to drive him to Nebraska. And thus the story begins, a road trip with a marginalized son and his distant and alcoholic father.

Like many of the best movies I know, it is difficult to characterize Nebraska in few words. The film is funny, but you couldn’t really call it a comedy, and tragic, but not really a tragedy. Woody’s stubborn drive to claim his prize, in all its delusion, becomes not only in some sense endearing, but vital. It seems as though he derives more satisfaction from the thought of winning than he would have from the money itself, and certainly more from the pursuit than he had had in a very long time. The viewer wants to see him finish the trip, in spite of various self-inflicted complications along the way, but at the same time you dread the inevitable outcome.

Much of the film takes place in the little town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, where Woody grew up and where David has decided to stop to spend the weekend. The movie really captures small town sentiments and mannerisms here, to such an extent of authenticity that if you put some mountains in the distance, I would have felt like I was back home in Idaho while I was watching. The small town culture is frequently played to comedic effect, but never in an unrealistic way. And even more frequently, the town builds up a wistful longing for the past with the same economy as in the opening scene. Through it we come to understand Woody’s devotion to claiming the prize a little bit more.

I can’t really call a review of Nebraska complete without mentioning the fact that it is black and white. The deliberate choice to produce a movie without color is obviously unusual these days, and one has to ask why. I’ve seen other movies produced in black and white well after the advent of color, including The Artist and Good Night and Good Luck. But those films were generally set in the time periods of black and white film, and the lack of color in the movie enforces the setting. But Nebraska is firmly grounded in the present day, at least in literal terms. David’s Subaru Outback in the film is newer than my own. The black and white, then, serves a different purpose. Much of the film deals with contemplations of Woody’s past and the past of the little town of Hawthorne, and the black and white in the movie becomes something like an homage to times gone by. The score adds to this effect, sounding novel but having a folksy and solemn style that fits perfectly into the empty streets and country roads.

In the end, the film speaks a little on various themes, including greed, delusion, dedication, aging, and estrangement, but it never pretends to have all of the answers. Instead, it leaves pretty much all conclusions liberally to interpretation, and that fact is appealing on its own. By that observation, Nebraska is regional art at its finest, and it is wonderful to watch.

tl;dr: Nebraska has the unique accomplishment of making you feel nostalgic for a life you never had or saw.