Graduate, The [40th Anniversary Edition]

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I hadn't seen "The Graduate" in years, and so I welcomed the chance to preview the new 40th Anniversary Edition that MGM just released. Two audio commentaries have been added to this version, as well as a few new short features and a second audio disc featuring four Simon & Garfunkel songs from the original soundtrack album. If you're doing the download math, that saves you iPod people roughly four dollars.

But it's the film itself that's the surprise. I'd forgotten how self-consciously stylish "The Graduate" is--how many artsy shots it employs, for example. The most famous, of course, is the cover shot showing Dustin Hoffman through the space formed between the bottom of the frame and an outstretched woman's leg. Only slightly less famous are the shots of Hoffman in scuba gear showing off his birthday present, or the shot of him pounding on the glass at the church. My favorites, though, are shots through a fish tank and in the reflected glass surface of a coffee table. Such heavy-handed camerawork occurs throughout the film in striking ways. And yet, despite all those artsy shots, director Mike Nichols' "baby" also smacks of the Great American home movie.

Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, a recent college grad who's so fawned over by his parents and poked and proded by his parents' friends that he looks like a deer in headlights in almost every frame--the way people do when amateur photographers turn the camera on them and tell them, "Say something." You get that feeling a lot, during the film, which is designed to help the audience feel and experience things from Braddock's point of view, though Ben is pictured, and so it isn't traditional point-of-view filming. But it reinforces Ben's situation perfectly.

Benjamin is confused about his future, overwhelmed and embarrassed by the attention he's getting ("Everybody, let me read to you all the nice things that Benjamin's friends wrote in his yearbook"), pressured by people asking him what he's going to do with his life, and annoyed that everyone seems to have advice for him.

Then there's Mrs. Robinson.

Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know . . . wo, wo, wo

Or maybe it should be spelled "w-o-e," because Benjamin's life gets suddenly complicated when the wife of his father's business partner--someone he's known his whole life--puts the moves on him after insisting he take her home from the party his parents threw in his honor. At first comically put off, Ben embraces his inner horny guy and begins an affair with the older woman. Though Hoffman reminds us in an interview carried over from the first DVD release that the age difference between him and this "older" actress was just five years, Anne Bancroft makes the jaded and chain-smoking Mrs. Robinson seem frighteningly older. At one point Ben stammers, shouldn't we talk one of these times, but she quickly squashes him: What's there to talk about? We have nothing in common."

It's Bancroft and Hoffman who make this film memorable, but the rest of the cast are no slouches either. Elizabeth Wilson and William Daniels are appropriately doting (and clueless) as Mr. and Mrs. Braddock, while Murray Hamilton is convincing as the cuckolded Mr. Robinson., while TV-on-DVD fans will enjoy cameos from people like Norman Fell ("Three's Company") and Alice Ghostley and Marion Lorne ("Bewitched"). Then there's Katharine Ross, who does a pretty good job as "the other woman." When Mr. Robinson tries to get Ben to take out his daughter, she complicates his life even more than her mother has. In the end, "The Graduate" is less a document of the '60s than it is a coming-of-age tale with a fanciful twist and plenty of cinematic style.

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