"The Swimmer" is a brilliant one-man show for aging Burt Lancaster - - an impressionistic swirl of suburban alienation that hits vaguely like a reverse-image of "The Graduate." Director Frank Perry (most in- famous for TV films like "Mommie Dearest") allows his actors total free reign in their characterizations and this results in an uneven film that feels like it's supposed to be uneven. Lancaster holds the whole enterprise together.... he had long before figured out how, with films like "Sweet Smell of Success", to make himself less appealing. But all his performances are grandiose, and here he's given us a vision of the grand pathetic.... a sort of suburban Lear.
The film thematically is very interesting, as you don't really see a film very often about personal failure. His professional failure is something that we figure out about halfway through the film, but we don't want to face the idea that he is a failure as a human being any more than he does. Every gesture that seems spontaneous early in the film, every moment that comes across as an expression of his will to power and his joy in living, later reveals itself as dull repetition and escapism. There is a thin line between the casual recklessness of the perpetual winner and the empty boasts of the fallen champion.
There's more going on in the film's script than meets the eye, so I'll just take a single motif and look at it in that context.... how about, alcohol? In the first scene, Lancaster's character refuses a drink which is repeatedly being offered to him by his seemingly over-the- hill younger friends. Lancaster comes off in this scene as a winner, physically fit and envied by his friends who are dependent on alcohol to bond or relax or distract themselves. About halfway through his journey, he begins to reluctantly accept a drink ("just one, to be polite"), but by the time he arrives at his former lover's (Janice Rule) house, he admits "I need one." Looking back on the first scene in hindsight with what we know by the end, his friends come off a lot better. They're disturbed to see him in a state of denial, they want to hear "all about it" over a drink; they've gone from being the losers to the winners. The difference is one of perspective: as Julie's (Janet Landgard) cute crush on the guy she babysits for morphs into a dangerous situation where Ned (Lancaster) harbors unrequited affection for the nymph who is now even more inappropriate as a partner.
I like the film a great deal, not so much as a finished product which is in many ways unevenly executed and deficient as entertainment (too episodic and without enough verve), but as a springboard for conversation and thought. I would compare it to a film like Joe Losey's "Boy with Green Hair", another "cult" film -- far from being "great" in any sense but also genuine and unconventional enough to resonate and take on a life of its own.
The film thematically is very interesting, as you don't really see a film very often about personal failure. His professional failure is something that we figure out about halfway through the film, but we don't want to face the idea that he is a failure as a human being any more than he does. Every gesture that seems spontaneous early in the film, every moment that comes across as an expression of his will to power and his joy in living, later reveals itself as dull repetition and escapism. There is a thin line between the casual recklessness of the perpetual winner and the empty boasts of the fallen champion.
There's more going on in the film's script than meets the eye, so I'll just take a single motif and look at it in that context.... how about, alcohol? In the first scene, Lancaster's character refuses a drink which is repeatedly being offered to him by his seemingly over-the- hill younger friends. Lancaster comes off in this scene as a winner, physically fit and envied by his friends who are dependent on alcohol to bond or relax or distract themselves. About halfway through his journey, he begins to reluctantly accept a drink ("just one, to be polite"), but by the time he arrives at his former lover's (Janice Rule) house, he admits "I need one." Looking back on the first scene in hindsight with what we know by the end, his friends come off a lot better. They're disturbed to see him in a state of denial, they want to hear "all about it" over a drink; they've gone from being the losers to the winners. The difference is one of perspective: as Julie's (Janet Landgard) cute crush on the guy she babysits for morphs into a dangerous situation where Ned (Lancaster) harbors unrequited affection for the nymph who is now even more inappropriate as a partner.
I like the film a great deal, not so much as a finished product which is in many ways unevenly executed and deficient as entertainment (too episodic and without enough verve), but as a springboard for conversation and thought. I would compare it to a film like Joe Losey's "Boy with Green Hair", another "cult" film -- far from being "great" in any sense but also genuine and unconventional enough to resonate and take on a life of its own.