Can you improve on The Graduate?
It is 50 years since The Graduate was released in cinemas. The film made Dustin Hoffman a star – but it would have been more honest, more insightful, and more successful without him, writes Nicholas Barber.
When The Graduate came out 50 years ago, it was as big a hit as a melancholy, low- budget indie movie could possibly be. “It’s like an explosion, a dam bursting,” one studio executive told The New Yorker. “Wherever we’ve played it, whatever the weather, it’s a sell- out attraction. And people have been coming back two and three times to see it again. I haven’t seen anything like this in all the years I’ve been in the business.”
Mike Nichols’ existential tragicomedy went onto be the highest grossing film of 1967, as well as being nominated for five Oscars - and a lot of that was down to its leading man, Dustin Hoffman. His performance in the central role is a comic tour de force which didn’t just make him a superstar. It opened the door for a new, less conventional type of Hollywood pin- up. “A whole generation changed its idea of what guys should look like,” commented Buck Henry, the film’s co-writer. If Hoffman could kiss not one but two delectable co-stars, then Al Pacino and Woody Allen could be viable romantic heroes, too.
But was he really the right choice to be The Graduate? There is a chance – a slim chance, admittedly – that the film might have been more honest, more insightful, and more successful without him.
Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, a 20- year- old who returns from college “out East” to his parents’ house in sundrenched suburban California. By all accounts he had a stellar time on campus. He was the captain of the debating club and the cross-country team, and he was the editor of the student newspaper. Back at home, his situation looks even better. His parents buy him a red Alfa Romeo Spider, and their buddies keep giving him tips on how to have a high- flying career. (“Just one word: plastics.”) But Benjamin is deeply miserable. He is “just sort of disturbed about things,” he mumbles. He wants his life to be “different”.
His only distraction from this vague but paralysing malaise is an affair with his parents’ sophisticated friend Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft). But after a few weeks of hotel liaisons, Benjamin is forced to go on a date with Mrs Robinson’s daughter (Katharine Ross), and he inconveniently falls in love with her.
Scripted by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, The Graduate is largely faithful to Charles Webb’s source novel, which was published in 1963, but Nichols makes a few inspired changes. The most obvious of these was casting Hoffman. Webb’s Benjamin is tall, blonde, athletic and handsome, much like the author himself; in Hoffman’s words, he is a “super- Wasp Boston Brahmin”. But Nichols had other ideas. Having met hundreds of potential Benjamins, he handed the part to an unknown actor who was short, darkhaired, and Jewish – an actor, that is, much like the director.
Odd man out
Hoffman, of course, is magnificent. He plays the role with such jittery panache that it’s now hard to imagine anyone else being Benjamin. But that counter-intuitive casting does have its disadvantages. As great as he is, Hoffman makes the film softer and less challenging than it might otherwise have been.
On the page, The Graduate is the story of someone who has a charmed life, but who finds that life less than charming. The questions it poses are: why? Why doesn’t Benjamin belong in his parents’ shinily affluent world? Why can’t he be happy with the conformist, consumerist future that they have mapped out for him? What is it about 1960s America that prompts a young, healthy, well-educated and prosperous baby boomer to be “sort of disturbed” rather than sort of delighted?
These are all difficult questions, but Hoffman offers easy answers. Shuffling through the film like a Martian who bumped his head when he crash-landed on Earth, he plays Benjamin as an underdog outsider in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He couldn’t get a job in McDonald’s, let alone in “plastics”. From the moment we see him in near-catatonic agony at his welcome- home party, there’s no need for us to ask why he doesn’t fit into the land of bourbon, barbecues, and back-slapping. Just look at him, and listen to him, and it’s clear: he doesn’t fit in anywhere.
Once Mrs Robinson propositions him, Benjamin becomes even more of a hapless buffoon. He plucks up the courage to meet her in the Taft Hotel, but he kisses her when she has a mouthful of cigarette smoke, he lets out involuntary bleats whenever he panics ( a tic Hoffman borrowed from Nichols), and he speaks in the strangulated, highpitched voice of someone auditioning for The Muppet Show.
These scenes may make us squirm and cringe, but they’re fundamentally comforting. We don’t have to consider why an Adonis – “the kind of guy who has to fight ' em off,” to quote Mr Robinson – would countenance an affair with the wife of his father’s business partner. We can relax and laugh at the farcical misadventures of a virginal sad sack instead. And an hour later, at the end of the film, we don’t have to consider whether Benjamin is any differ- ent from Carl, the blonde alpha male whom Elaine is pushed into marrying. We can see at a glance that they’re nothing like each other.
In general, Hoffman’s casting means that we don’t have to consider reality at all, because he turns a study of middle-class disaffection into a cartoonish fantasy. How else to define a film in which someone as bumbling, awkward, and downright odd as Benjamin could be the Big Man on Campus?
Shoulda woulda coulda
Among the more logical candidates for the role were Warren Beatty – who went on to make Heaven Can Wait with Buck Henry – and Robert Redford, whom Nichols had directed on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park in 1963. Hoffman himself had argued in favour of Redford. When Nichols invited him to audition, he protested: ‘I’m not right for this part, sir. This is a Gentile. This is a Wasp. This is Robert Redford.’
Redford lobbied for the role, too. Talking to Vanity Fair in 2008, Nichols remembers how he let his friend down gently. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”
It’s a lovely anecdote, but it glosses over one key point: Benjamin isn’t a loser. He doesn’t strike out with a girl. Not only does Mrs Robinson pursue him with the cold relentlessness of The Terminator, but her beautiful daughter is smitten, too, never mind how cruelly he mistreats her. That might have been plausible with Redford in the title role. With Hoffman... not so much.
In a more scrupulous version of The Graduate, the anxious and dissatisfied hero would have been a hunk: Mad Men managed to pull off that trick 40 years later. But, back in 1967, it’s possible that it simply wouldn’t have worked if Nichols had cast Redford, or an actor like him. As it is, the film asks us to sympathise with a Benjamin who is more privileged than most people on the planet. It succeeds wonderfully, which is why we’re still watching it and talking about it after half a century. But if Benjamin had looked like the Sundance Kid, that might have been asking too much. (BBC)