I have been rethinking my admiration for the film “The Graduate” lately. There is something about it that always bothered me and bothers me more today than when I watched it the first or second or third time. It is Benjamin’s vacuousness. He is bored and disillusioned and indifferent to success and material wealth, but why? It is never clear what, if anything, drives his rejection of his parents’ values, other than, eventually, his desire for Elaine, who becomes a stand in for everything that Benjamin wants. But what does he really want? An authentic relationship with a real person?
It is a pleasant mystery that “The Graduate” works pretty well without answering that question. And it may have been smart for Mike Nichols to ignore the issue, because it allows us to read into it whatever we want. But, after all, this is the 1960’s. It’s a bit surreal the way the counter-culture is completely invisible to everyone in the movie.
The sharpest statement may well be Benjamin locking the Robinsons and his own parents in the church, at the end, with the cross: his parents and their generation is trapped by their callow religious beliefs into a raving, seething mass of bitterness and regret, while Benjamin and Elaine escape to freedom and liberation and a very uncertain future. Maybe they end up joining a commune. Maybe not.
And as I’m writing this I am beginning to realize that no, they shouldn’t change a thing about that issue.
On the other hand, I agree with Roger Ebert who revised his opinion of the film downwards years after it came out. Apparently, he became more sympathetic to Mrs. Robinson and less sympathetic to Ben, whom he found smug and insufferable. There’s something to that, I agree, but my biggest objection is to the draggy their act, that long, somewhat dreary sequence of events leading from the exposure of his affair and the wedding.
If I were a director, I’d have had Benjamin drafted, and, in parallel stories, describe how Elaine becomes disillusioned with Buck or Biff or whoever she married, and more and more sympathetic to counter-culture ideals. In the end, she and Benjamin escape to Canada together.