Word: benjamin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week conspiracy was again in the news-as Dr. Benjamin Spock, Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin and three others stood indicted for conspiring to violate the Selective Service Act. The charges had been brought after weeks of preparation by Attorney General Ramsey Clark's Justice Department. It all apparently pleased one of the codefendants, however. Said Harvard Graduate Student Michael Ferber: "This is the best thing that ever happened to us." But despite the bravado, he may find conspiracy a tough charge to beat...
...Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) returns home a college graduate without plans for the future; he spends a few weeks stifling in suburbia, then begins an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father's business partner. Forced by his parents to date the Robinson daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross) in deference to social amenities, Benjamin initially antagonizes the girl as per Mrs. Robinson's instructions, then falls in love with...
...picture's potentially promising plot premise purports to be the problem of two people falling in love, the boy having slept with the girl's mother. For the twenty minutes of The Graduate that chronicle the initial stages of the Benjamin-Elaine courtship, Nichols hits his stride, providing a relevant contemporary romance different from the Hollywood norm, apparently setting the scene for a comic examination of the inevitable ensuing conflicts...
...rapidly degenerates into frenetic melodramatics, ending in the all-too-frequent last minute chase, a triumph of love-over-everything guaranteed to warm even the hearts of a Brattle Theatre audience during the Bogart festival. Safe in the back of a bus from the irate witnesses to their elopement, Benjamin and Elaine stop grinning and stare ahead, each considering for the first time the seriousness of their act and the problems ahead; Nichols' muting of the otherwise conventional happy ending adds some honesty to the denouement, at the same time creating a sense of regret that similarly thoughtful moments...
...hour resolves a conflict, but unfortunately not the conflict set-up in the first hour; The Graduate splits in two with scant transition, ultimately cancelling itself out. Nichols effects the break and abandons his premise by destroying the character of Elaine, reducing her to mere plot function. Elaine rejects Benjamin when her mother describes him as a calculating rapist, then promptly changes her mind when Benjamin denies the charges. Seriously questioning neither version of the affair (and our knowledge of Mrs. Robinson makes hard to imagine Elaine believing her mother in the first place), Elaine's amazing malleability and flirtatious...